The eerie stillness and quiet of the city, littered shamelessly with wreckage, was abruptly broken by a familiar, bellowing voice:
"Rock… paper… rock!"
"Gon!" Killua called out, rushing precisely west of his current position.
Followed closely by Misaki, the boy weaved his way through the clutter obstructing the streets and slipped between buildings until he reached a small clearing that revealed his comrade. It was obvious even from a distance that Gon's skin was shaded and patched with dirt, scrapes, and bruises of various sizes and degrees. The tanned boy was currently approaching an unconscious body on the opposite end of the lane, likely a result of having received a direct hit and ultimately being launched from their original position.
"As I thought, it's L.I.G.H.T. again," Haku told the boy (and upon advancing a few more steps the man came in to sight, hunched over the body with a business card placed directly before his straining eyes).
"Gon!" Killua shouted, perking up profusely.
The island boy's mood elevated quite suddenly once he turned his head to catch sight of his friend running toward him.
"Killua! We've looked all over for you!" he said with a strong wave of relief in his tone. As the boys firmly clasped opposite hands as an expression of their glee, he added, "I was worried you guys were hurt!"
"Not me," Killua grinned proudly, secretly holding back tears of joy.
"Oh, Misaki-san," Gon greeted the girl as his face contorted in to a gesture of genuine surprise. "What happened to your arm?"
"This and that," she replied with a shrug, glancing down at the puss and blood still oozing around the protruding fragments of glass.
Killua merely smirked at the response.
"There's a first aid kit at my place," Haku offered shyly, "if someone would be so kind as to help me find my house…"
True to the sentiment, the man was indeed stripped of his spectacles and essentially blinded. He held out his arms and slowly rotated them about this way and that as though doing so would assist him in deciphering whether or not his path was clear.
"I'll help you, Haku-san," Gon volunteered, skipping over and taking his arm.
"Thank you, Gon-kun," Haku returned with a smile. Turning to the others (or at least where he assumed the others were), he said, "While we're there, we can tell you two what we've discovered in during your absence."
The boys sat opposite of Misaki at the dining table, which was fortunately still in almost immaculate condition considering the magnitude of the earthquakes that would have passed through previously. Upon it was a formidably sized first aid kit, opened and surrounded by antiseptic washes, ointments, and gauze. Her arm was positioned palm-down and width-wise before her as she performed treatment to the site of the lesion. Killua watched her technique with mild interest as the girl proceeded to use angled-tip tweezers to simply pluck the glass from her wound, while Gon seemed alternatively quite enthralled with the procedure.
"Doesn't that hurt?" he asked curiously, a slight sense of awe winding its way in to his words.
Fighting a wince as she wrenched a comparatively large shard from her flesh, she replied casually, "Of course."
A seemingly endless crash sounded from the next room, the sound of multiple items rolling and shifting about continuing on even long afterward.
"Is everything okay in there?" Misaki called out in a fairly uninterested tone.
"Y-Yes, I'm fine!" Haku answered amidst the echo of shuffling. After a brief moment of relative silence, he exclaimed, "Ah-ha!" before reappearing with a laptop case clasped in his hands.
Using his index finger to push the spare pair of glasses he'd retrieved back up the bridge of his nose, Haku simultaneously unzipped the case and then hastily placed the glossy, black, portable computer on to the table alongside the treatment supplies. A high-pitched squealing sound escaped his lips as he pressed his fingertip to the power button.
"There is still some battery left!" he cheered as he drew his excited fists against his chest.
"Weren't you going to tell us something?" Killua urged impatiently.
"Yes, of course," the man agreed quickly, clearing his throat. He nodded to Gon before continuing with, "Gon and I washed up on the main island south of this one. We'd always planned to come back here to search for you, but we had to wait until the gases had stabilized, of course. As soon as enough time passed, we rented a boat and hurried over, assuming that you would probably have the same idea.
"However, when we arrived we found that someone else was here, too. In fact, an entire group of people were here, all dressed in black suits, and they were in the middle of using some strange technique to remove the bodies from the streets. There were about five men pulling handkerchiefs out of their sleeves and expanding them probably one thousand times larger. Then they would throw the sheets over a group of deceased bodies and those bodies would vanish when the cloth reverted back to its original size.
"Naturally we tried to stay hidden in case these people were dangerous," he continued. "Gon-kun was worried that they might have already captured you two using the same technique."
"Pardon me," Misaki interrupted with the implication that she was not particularly apologetic for the intrusion, "but you say that you rented a boat to get here, too?"
"There weren't any boats around the island," Killua elaborated, realizing immediately what she was questioning.
"Of course you didn't see our boat," Haku replied with a frown.
"Yours is probably gone now, too," Gon agreed.
Killua and Misaki locked stares for a quick moment before the girl turned her attention back to the antiseptic she was presently free-pouring over her crimson and purple-yellow speckled flesh.
Haku continued, "Whoever these people are, they're pretty organized and they definitely were prepared for the eruption. I don't know why anybody would want to keep others away from the island, per se, but clearly they're here to clean up the mess and to fight off anyone that shows up in the meantime. It's perhaps some sort of conspiracy, though what there would be to gain from going through with all this, I haven't the slightest."
"L.I.G.H.T.," Killua whispered, touching a knuckle to his lips in thought.
"Yes, we found cards with that acronym on everyone that we fought," Haku confirmed with a nod. "Some of them spotted and came after us and when we defeated them all we found on their person besides the handkerchiefs were those cards." Withdrawing a handful of them from his pocket and tossing them on to the table, he explained, "The only variant from card to card seems to be the registration numbers."
"We?" Misaki asked with a cocked eyebrow as she smeared ointment across the back of her forearm.
"Huh?"
"You said 'everyone that we fought'," she clarified. "Since when do you fight your own battles?"
Grunting mildly in frustration, Haku admitted, "Okay, everyone that Gon fought. Are you quite happy now?"
"Tickled pink," she responded in a grave voice, her eyes fixated on the roll of gauze she was currently wrapping her wounded flesh in.
"Who would have something to gain from keeping the eruption a secret and erasing the evidence after?" Killua pondered aloud.
Slowly, all eyes magnetized to Haku.
"It's not me!" the man insisted, folding his arms defiantly over his chest.
"Haku-san is not resourceful enough or influential enough to have an entire network of lackeys pulling off something like this for him," Misaki agreed.
The man scowled darkly at his former hire.
"L.I.G.H.T.," Gon murmured to himself. "What does that mean?"
A thoughtful silence fell over the household during which the only sound that could be heard was the occasional tapping of Haku's keyboard. Eyes narrowed and fingertips rose to chins, but still no one could successfully decode the acronym.
"Eureka!" Haku screeched suddenly, causing the remainder of the table's occupants to jolt slightly.
"You figured out what L.I.G.H.T. stands for?" Gon asked excitedly.
"No," Haku dismissed him optimistically, hurriedly leaping from his seat to retrieve a small printer and cable from the adjoined room.
"Then what are you so excited about?" Killua questioned, annoyed with the interruption.
"It's much better than that!" Haku grinned as he clicked madly about on his screen. With a gleam in his eye, he glanced up and proclaimed, "I just hacked a map to their headquarters!"
A/N: Thank you for reading and reviewing! A "new" thanks to 2102032 for your recent wave of reviews :D