Notes: this chapter took longer than expected as I went back and edited some scenes but here is the final product! there will be one more short chapter after this to wrap things up, but here's the main event of the story


Sunday. The last day of the weeklong training.

The two started in the early morning, planning to fight multiple times until either Killua made progress, or until the day ended and their time was up.

Machi materialized her Nen.

And Killua spread his feet apart in a fighting stance.

Machi let Killua take the first shot. Unsurprisingly, he gathered a mass of electricity and shot it–at the air that replaced Machi in the space she'd occupied seconds ago.

Disappointed, Killua attempted distraction. "Will you fight as if you're fighting Chrollo? Go easy so that I can learn."

Masses of thread formed a menacing cage that threatened to enclose Killua and crowd out visible light.

"You will not speak of what you saw yesterday. You will not act on it, ever. After we're done, you'll put this nonsense behind you." Machi seethed.

Killua yanked and ripped, taking out the web.

"Jeez, then why'd you show it to me?"

Machi, with her characteristically sharp retorts, was at a loss for an explanation. The sight of Killua beginning to adjust to her fighting tactics didn't aid her response.

Machi had dismissed the leakage of her memories as an oversight. She hadn't investigated the Transmutation Spectrum ability thoroughly enough, and it had come back to bite her.

Was it really an oversight, though? Machi was more cautious than that. Slip-ups didn't happen for no reason.

Was it Killua's repeated failures to make progress that subdued Machi's attention into autopilot? Was it that her leaked memories weren't sensitive information?

Or was the slip-up related to the fact that she was training Killua specifically?

Machi saw an undeveloped, less-than-secure child. He was out and about, running away from familial responsibilities like a delinquent, yet so persistent in carrying out his training deal with Illumi. He claimed independence from his family, yet there he was, relying on the same old assassin techniques.

Killua frustrated Machi. He gave her the same feeling that loomed when she'd beaten up an enemy whose Nen-enhanced resilience kept him from taking his last breath, even after thousands of jabs. It was the same feeling that brewed when she sewed a body part back in place, only to find a depleted thread supply as she was just inches away from tying the last knot.

Maybe it was a taunting dissatisfaction that pushed her to bring Killua's training to its fully-fledged, powerful end–regardless of which ending that meant.

No. The memory leakage would not come back to bite her.

Machi would do the biting herself.

Nen threads materialized. Machi gathered the mounds that she pulled out earlier in retaliation against the mention of Chrollo. The threads twisted together, ends winding back and forth and snaking into a vaguely living form.

A dragon.

Not unlike Zeno Zoldyck's Dragon Lance.

Why hadn't Machi faltered against Killua, who had grown considerably more powerful since developing his powers and confidence while battling the Chimera Ants?

While Killua was off facing challenges, Machi and the Troupe had not remained stagnant. Machi was aware of the rapidly changing Nen landscape. Her position as a Spider was a precarious balance, with masses of new contenders and acquired enemies. One wrong move could spell not only the end of her career, but the end of her life.

Many of those foreseen threats came from the Zoldyck family. They were the Phantom Troupe's partners at times, and opponents at others, depending on which recruiter offered the most lucrative pay.

Machi continuously sought new horizons to bring her Nen stitches to. In the past months, she'd studied vastly different enemies' attacks, including Zeno's. In the Phantom Troupe, you couldn't afford to attack at the first sign of blood. You needed to sharpen your teeth ten steps ahead, and bare your fangs at the faintest indication that there was a more threatening lifeform.

Machi's stitched dragon gleamed golden-red. As threads continued to wrap and reinforce, the main body surged forward at Killua, mouth wide open and needle-formed teeth poised to bite.

Killua looked at Machi's thread dragon, undertones of horror, nostalgia, and awe encircling him—a ghastly combination.

The dragon had hit too close to home.

Before him was the dragon that his grandfather wielded. It was Zeno's pride and accomplishment, the pinnacle of the vicious and unrelenting Zoldyck upbringing that produced the most powerful and ruthless assassins.

Why was Machi using grandfather's dragon?

Killua braced himself as the dragon charged. He tried to run, to stretch the distance between himself and that horrifying, outstretched maw. He stumbled and slipped, tripping and regaining his footing.

The dragon outmatched his capacity to run. Killua felt fangs clamp down into his torso.

Sharp needles and prickly pain. Blood dripping in warm trickles down polished metal needles and once-pristine thread.

Killua had gone through needle torture before (courtesy of Illumi, of course). Though it fortified Killua against the physical toll, it didn't make each new stab wound any more pleasant.

Everything about the spectacle unfolding around Killua was wrong. Wrong in multiple ways.

He shouldn't be finding himself pitted against sharp objects, yet again, having learned their dangers one too many times through Illumi's needles and the Ortho Siblings' darts.

He wasn't supposed to fight the Dragon Lance, his own family.

Machi shouldn't be so intricately tied with his family.

The last thought struck a chord.

Speaking in familiar terms, Killua's family resembled the cold flakes of ice that he'd transmuted his electricity into the day before, except multiplied a-hundred-fold in a freezing intensity that chomped your hands off and numbed the mind.

Machi was a boiling water that raged with defiance against the order that the constrictive Hunter society imposed. In a way, she was stronger than their cold, methodical assassination system. Her whims boiled and burned and escaped into the vast emptiness above that screamed bloody freedom.

A boiling, bloody freedom that didn't exactly make the safest training conditions for Killua, he thought regrettably.

He zapped his Nen into the dragon's mouth. Its Nen-lit eyes flared as the dragon threw its head upwards and unclamped Killua.

A few moments of respite were granted as the dragon thrashed, waiting out the last of the leftover electricity.

"Oof." Killua felt more air than necessary leave his lungs as he hit the ceiling. He started falling.

On the way down, he spread his limbs apart and landed on all fours.

Killua straightened back into a defensive stance.

Killua remembered the times Machi went against other members of the Troupe to rescue Chrollo, even if it spelled the downfall of the entire Spider for the sake of its head. She supported Pakunoda in the exchange of hostages with Kurapika. She threatened to kill Hisoka if he killed Chrollo. She'd always forsaken utilitarian ideas of preserving the Troupe's survival in favor of saving what was important to her.

Machi did not methodically pursue the best interests of her Troupe. She aimed her own shots and did whatever she needed to.

Killua thought back to the teachings of his family. The precise, deadly strikes. The rehearsed battle sequences. Even the listing of poisons to develop targeted resistance against other assassins' most deadly weapons. All methodical, calculated, and meticulously planned.

Yes, the makeshift Dragon Lance that Machi had produced was wrong. But it was wrong in all the right ways. It poked and prodded at Killua, in the most uncomfortable spots.

It picked at Killua's figurative shackles. Loosened, Killua let his instinct take over.

Machi was behind him on his right. A movement in the corner of his eye told him to strike upwards. Machi, indeed soaring over Killua, startled but quickly pivoted around his shot.

Killua didn't miss the catch in Machi's rhythm. He followed Machi's somersault and released his electricity, not as a thin, concentrated streak of aura, but an all-encompassing electric web that buzzed and crackled, wild and loose.

Machi's hair shot up as she was caught in the center of an entropic mass of electricity.

Killua's eyes flashed triumphantly. "I caught a Spider in my own web."

"Yeah, right." Machi said. "Make sure your prey is secure before you go around boasting." She neutralized Killua's Nen with her own web of thread, Nen stitches jabbing at the electric mesh.

Machi threw a needle, reinforced by a trail of Nen, towards Killua's head. He swung away in time only because he used a bout of Godspeed. The needle slashed through his skin and a tuft of hair before embedding itself into the wall behind him with a deep, sickening crack.

Killua's expression was a mixture of fear, anger, and excitement. Machi was becoming serious. No more simulating or training–Machi would fight him for real. Enacting the stitched dragon and needle shot, Machi had injured Killua.

But Killua had also electrocuted Machi.

Machi's dragon bellowed a deafening roar and flew at Killua.

Killua unleashed an earth-shattering thunderstorm.

The dragon clashed with the storm.

The training arena was in ruins as windows shattered, floorboards crumbled, and ceiling lights burst.

"Forgo your family's mindset. You don't have to utterly defeat an opponent to win." Machi's voice carried through, clear and grounding, amidst flying dust and splintering glass. "Your goal today is to cut my thread. That's it. Do what you need to do. Not what your family needs you to do."

As Killua and Machi skirted and danced around each other, threaded dragon and electric Nen each doing its best to rip up the other, Killua's jumble of emotions morphed into something that he'd felt when he was younger.

He remembered when he used to roughhouse with Alluka as toddlers. They'd chase each other around and feign attacks on each other. Alluka would call on Nanika to give Killua a hard time, beating him in both speed and force. It was a Nen-less training, just between the two of them, like the poison and torture training Killua had done with Silva and Illumi.

But playing with Alluka was nothing like his other training.

With the rest of his family, Killua trained to become an assassin, their assassin. With Nanika's powers, Killua trained because it was fun to engage in a contest whose victory–just barely out of reach–taunted and enticed him.

Alluka's training strengthened him not only physically, but went deep into his being and told him that whatever was there, whatever Killua's essence boiled down to, was amazing exactly the way it was–without the carefully placed molds, without the bracing and tethering that would guide Killua's actions further and further away from autonomy.

Similar to how now, Machi and her memories were encouraging him to forgo his family's standards. Not only that, she was a living example of everything Killua was too cautious to become.

Killua realized that although it was Illumi who commissioned Machi to train him, what he saw in Machi was the same as what was trying to burgeon out of Killua himself.

Machi extended her thread-powered dragon towards Killua. Killua braced himself and unleashed a rapid downpour of electric strikes with all the defiance and self-assurance that had been bottled up over the years of his grueling, empty training.

As Machi made to strengthen each thread against each bolt of electricity, Killua's shapeless and shifting electric plasma took on a new degree of power and unleashed entropic chaos.

His once sharp and precise strikes became unhinged. Electricity tore at even non-conductive thread. It had the fluidity of water, the corrosiveness of acid, the wrath of fire, the spectacle of light, with a tinge of cookie dough scent.

The electric storm occupied the dragon entirely.

But Killua went further.

One strike, single-minded and heedless, cascaded past the others, reaching a whisker on Machi's dragon. It made contact, and then exploded.

A burst of pink erupted amidst blue electricity.

Machi let her eyes widen for a second–the left whisker on her unbreakable dragon was severed.