Chapter Text

The forest surrounding the old mansion in the countryside of East Gorteau was peaceful, tranquil even. The cool morning air was perfectly still. The ancient spruce and fir trees obstructed vision, so for any observer on the ground the only sign that anything unusual had happened would have been the silence. Birds and other animals had yet to return. But from the air, it was clear that overnight the place had become a battlefield. Starting close to the building, a straight path of destruction ran nearly a mile through the forest. The trees were so large that when the site of the mansion was cleared decades earlier, it had taken teams of lumberjacks over a day to cut down each one, but now the trunks were splintered like matchsticks. The ground was gouged in places, severed tree roots sticking out of the soil like rebar from the rubble of a collapsed building. Outcrops of rock had been pulverized, and boulders flung hundreds of meters by an almost inconceivable force. And, a short distance from where the path finally ended, in the center of a circle large enough to hold a baseball game in where the trees had been charred and flattened and the ground stripped to bedrock and melted to glass, lay a single still body.

From a distance, the corpse could have been mistaken for a human, but the four-fingered hands, the long tail, and the bloodstains, once deep blue and now blue-black after hours of exposure to air, betrayed it to the knowledgeable few as a Chimera Ant. If such an informed observer had been there, they might have noted the missing head with some concern. The first generations of soldiers born with human genes could survive with their head and body separated for over a day. But the later generations, with more and more human DNA mixed in and a less insect-like physiology, had lost this ability. And even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. There was nothing left of the head, and the body’s vital organs had been destroyed by the blackened, shriveled remnants of a human arm that had impaled its thorax. The Ant was dead, its body cooled and all cellular activity ceased. And yet… and yet there was still a spark of life energy within the corpse, one that was growing stronger with every passing minute.

When Neferpitou’s head was crushed, her Nen ability, Terpsichora, remained active, and even grew in power, fueled by the Royal Guard’s unbreakable resolve to protect her king. Terpsichora, unlike a similar ability used by the Phantom Troupe member Shalnark, was designed to remain under Pitou’s direct control, increasing her strength more efficiently than a Specialist could with Ryu due to the distance between that type and Enhancement. However, with no neural signals to direct it, Terpsichora had reverted to the programming of the ability it was developed from: Puppeteer. It flung Pitou’s corpse at its target mindlessly, but with immense speed and power, attempting to carry out its user’s dying wish.

But the spark of life was not Terpsichora. As strong as the resolve driving the ability even after Pitou’s death was, there was a conflict. Her final thoughts had been satisfaction that Gon Freecs had, in gaining the power to kill her, destroyed himself, and she had succeeded in protecting the King from him. Gon’s last Jajanken, the strongest, was still not enough to completely destroy Pitou’s body and leave Terpsichora with nothing to use as a puppet. But it took the last of Gon’s borrowed power. His transformation collapsed, his aura vanished as he paid the price for his reckless vow, and as Killua carried the boy away, Terpsichora finally burnt out, its last instruction complete.

However, Terpsichora was an unusual ability. After Pitou’s death, it reverted to Puppeteer’s programming, and created a dense shroud of aura encompassing her body, shielding it and preventing it from disintegrating under the force of its own attacks, and that aura still had Pitou’s ‘fingerprint.’ As a result, when Pitou’s soul started to leave her body it was ‘reflected’ by the shroud of aura and trapped, partially bound, even after Terpsichora dissipated. The metaphysics of such an event were unknown to science, due to the immense rarity of the circumstances required – a self-targeting manipulation ability persisting as Residual Nen after the user’s death with it active. But it happened. Normally, nothing would have changed: the soul would eventually lose its connection to the body as it decayed. But this was the exception. What happened couldn’t really be called a conscious thought, because consciousness was impossible with a brain reduced to fine droplets splattered around her penultimate resting place against a tree. But something stirred within the Ant. More than an emotion, it was a primal drive that had been buried beneath her devotion to the King. It wasn’t the instinct of a Royal Guard, it was something human, and feline, and part of all the other species whose genes had been merged with those of the Queen to create Pitou: the will to live.

As the hours passed, that drive grew stronger. Pitou’s corpse was still silent and motionless, not even a flicker of electrical nerve activity, but a thick black aura began to seep from it and spread across the ground like fog. In the hours since Gon’s final Jajanken some leaves had blown into the scoured area. They started to smoke, then crumbled into ash. Any observer would have noticed the sky seem to darken. The aura formed itself into tendrils, rising into the air and arcing, twisting, merging and twining around each other in a chaotic mass, like tangled yarn. But within the convolution one pattern kept reoccurring. A straight line, with a helix coiled around it – a snake coiled around a staff. It was a symbol Pitou had seen in one of Peggy’s books: the Rod of Asclepius. In the aura on the ground and in the tendrils, eyes began to open – hundreds of them, thousands, burning red and yellow with more eyes swimming and rolling in their pupils, and Pitou’s other ability activated for the first time.

The first Nen ability Pitou developed was Doctor Blythe, intended to simply piece the white-haired human’s dismembered body back together and regenerate the flesh in the absence of his own life force. Pitou thought of the body as nothing more than an elaborate puzzle, and believed this would be enough. But it wasn’t: all she got was a better-looking corpse. The medical textbooks held no answers besides telling her what she wanted was impossible, but other books, what Peggy called ‘mythology’, provided tantalizing clues. Life energy came from something linked to the body, but intangible, the thing which had somehow survived when some of the humans were eaten and merged with the new ants created with their DNA, resulting in many of them being born with human memories. Pitou just had to get it back somehow. That was the idea behind her second attempt at a healing ability: Asclepius.

But Asclepius had never worked. It hadn’t even activated properly, not when trying to bring back the white-haired human, or any of the dead animals or even unfortunate grunt ants Pitou tested it on. Unable to figure out the problem, she soon abandoned it and developed Puppeteer, which turned out to be unsatisfying, yet useful. What Pitou didn’t know was that she never met a critical requirement for Asclepius, one not set by a Nen restriction but by the nature of the intended task.

Bringing back a dead person with Nen was generally considered impossible, but this was not the case. It was merely almost impossible. It required a particular kind of specialist aura, and the amount of aura required to overcome the energy barrier between life and death was immense. Only two or three Nen users in history had ever managed it. It was so much that without adding extra restrictions it would have used more aura than even Pitou, the strongest of the Royal Guards, had. But by chance Pitou had chosen a restriction that, technically, she met herself, along with the other requirement.

Neferpitou’s body began to twitch and smoke. The tendrils of aura curled inward, winding their way through it. Clear liquid started to leak from the stump of her neck, forming a puddle on top of the black aura. It congealed, forming a milky gel which hardened into a spiderweb of thin filaments of bone. The mesh worked its way outward and upward, bending into a bowl shape, and the strands thickened as more protoplasm flowed up them, as if icicles were somehow growing into the shape of a geodesic dome.

Asclepius was an exponential improvement on Doctor Blythe in terms of healing ability, relying purely on life energy to regenerate tissue, and using a complex algorithm – though Pitou didn’t know the term – to prioritize tasks and minimize the usage of both material and aura. Her aura was actually comparatively inefficient at healing. Even Doctor Blythe’s slow regeneration used more energy than an En with an average radius of over a kilometer, and Asclepius worked much faster, but also used much more aura. The ability had to be efficient. It started with the central nervous system and associated structures – first the brain and the skull, then the spine, including both the neck and the gaping hole in the thoracic vertebrae created by Gon’s arm. The tendrils of aura touched the severed limb, and it dissolved into black sludge.

At full strength, Pitou would have just barely had enough aura to complete a successful resurrection, but with her soul already tenuously connected to her body the hardest part was made substantially easier. However, she wasn’t at full strength. Days of sleep deprivation, continuous use of En, repeated activation of Doctor Blythe, and finally the fatal battle and Terpsichora’s postmortem reactivation had left her with about two thirds of her normal POP. It wasn’t enough. To avoid creating new material out of thin air Asclepius was pulling material from the rest of Pitou’s body, hollowing out bones and thinning muscles to rebuild the lost portions. It was able to recreate her head and restore her vital organs – her heart had been crushed and lungs and stomach ruptured by Gon’s severed arm. It was even able to fix most of the broken bones and torn tendons and ligaments, although just with thin threads of tissue, the equivalent of a welder tacking pieces of steel together to keep them in the right shape until a permanent joint could be made.

But there was just too much damage. After the mile-long flight through the forest, Terpsichora’s strings and reinforcing aura were the only thing holding the bones of Pitou’s left arm and right leg together, and the final Jajanken had caused even more damage to both bones and soft tissue. Before Asclepius’s work was done, Pitou ran out of aura. The ability kept functioning for another second and a half, further cannibalizing Pitou’s body for the power and material to complete the final step – sending the right nerve impulses in the right sequence in the heart and brain. Then it too burned out. The thousands of eyes closed or simply disappeared as the black aura dissipated, and what was left rose into the air as what looked like a cloud of smoke before it, too, vanished. Neferpitou’s heart began to beat again, she sucked in a breath, and her eyes snapped open.

It took Pitou a moment to make sense of the new sensations, and the memories flooding back into her head. Bright light, daylight, in her eyes. No sound. It was day – it should have been night. Silence. Pain, so much pain, it shouldn’t have even been possible for this much pain to exist. No aura… this was wrong. Gon? Where was Gon?

Pitou had no idea of what had happened after the first Jajanken had struck her, aside from a vague memory of tumbling helplessly through the forest until she came to rest against a tree. But she knew she shouldn’t be alive. Had Gon… had he let her live? No, that was impossible! She’d felt it in his aura: his hatred, his intent to kill, was absolute. It was as strong as her own resolve to eliminate him, perhaps even stronger. Pitou’s heart quickened. Had he left her and gone after the King? That power, that terrible aura… if he was able to return to the palace, the King would be in grave danger! And it was much later now… if something had happened…

No. Pitou still couldn’t make her body move, but she mentally shook herself. That too was impossible. The power the boy had gained was impossible to sustain. She figured at a minimum, he’d paid for it with his ability to use Nen, and most likely even with his life, and she had delayed him for long enough that he couldn’t have put off the inevitable long enough to reach the King. If she was alive, that could only mean it had happened faster than she expected. She’d been launched a long way away… had he died or lost his power before he was able to reach her? She couldn’t feel his aura, but with En…

But she couldn’t use En. Worse, Pitou realized with horror, she couldn’t use anything . It was like being in a state of Zetsu, but without even the pressure of the aura trying to escape. Even her Ten was gone. For a creature who had been able to use Nen from her first moment of consciousness, its absence was panic-inducing. It was like being blinded and paralyzed at the same time, and it was made worse with the knowledge that she was completely defenseless. In this state, the hatred Gon had directed at her while she healed Komugi in the palace could have killed her, let alone the aura he’d released at the mansion.

Even worse than the helplessness was the pain. When Pitou intentionally broke her left arm to try to appease the furious child, she’d taken a calculated risk. The small cuts and bruises she’d sustained in that glorious first fight with the white-haired human – Kite, she remembered Gon saying his name – hadn’t been a problem, and remembering how calm the King was when he tore his own arm off, she thought a broken one would be easy. But she’d misjudged things. Even though she’d intentionally made the break clean so it could be healed quickly, the pain made it much harder to concentrate, especially with Gon’s aura bearing down on her. She’d managed to keep her face from showing how much it hurt, but for the whole hour she was afraid she’d slip for a moment, and either Doctor Blythe would falter for a crucial moment and cost Komugi her life, or the extremely weak Ten she could maintain with the ability active would fail and the hateful aura would tear her apart. She was amazed by the King’s superior willpower and pain tolerance. Even though she was confident she could have killed Gon with one arm – prior to his transformation at least – she repaired the break as soon as she had an opportunity. This, though? This was on another level.

Against her will, Pitou rolled onto her side and doubled over, knees against her chest and breath tight in her throat. It was difficult to even tell where and how she was injured: the pain was so intense, and seemed to be everywhere at once. The hasty repair she’d done to her left arm with Doctor Blythe had failed, and the break seemed to be worse than before, with bone fragments poking against the skin. Her right leg was broken in multiple places, and couldn’t be moved in any coherent way. Her left leg felt like it was broken as well. She was visually able to confirm that she could move it, but only with great effort and she couldn’t actually feel where it was. Her head was throbbing with every heartbeat – unsurprising, she knew she’d been hit in the face and knocked out despite putting most of her aura into defending her head – and her abdomen and chest were definitely severely damaged, again unsurprisingly. Gon’s kick was much weaker than his Jajanken, but it had caught her off guard. Most of her aura had been in her limbs, powering the attack she’d hoped would end the fight before Gon could use his superior strength, and she had no time to protect herself. Ribs had to be broken, maybe her sternum as well. The muscles were torn and bruised, and she could only hope no internal organs were crushed.

It was impossible to function like this, impossible to even move. She had to use Doctor Blythe to repair at least some of the damage. Opening her abdomen to check for internal organ damage was too risky: Doctor Blythe operated semiautonomously but if she lost consciousness it would disappear, with fatal consequences. But she could at least fix her leg. Forgetting that she couldn’t use Nen, she tried to activate the healing construct, but again nothing happened. Again the failure of her powers brought feelings of fear and helplessness, and that caused her breathing to speed up. But breathing too was painful.

She recognized the potential vicious cycle and was able to suppress it, but there was another sensation brought on by the pain. A wave of nausea hit her. Nausea… that was supposed to be the body’s reaction to poisoning, but that made no sense. Nothing should have poisoned her. She gagged, and that only made her chest hurt even more. She had to stop this too… could she stop it? She remembered in her research on the human brain mention of the autonomic and non-autonomic nervous systems. No, this was a reflex that was impossible to control with conscious effort. Retching, she managed to push herself onto her hands and knees – or rather, one hand since her left arm couldn’t support any weight.

After Gon had impaled his arm through Pitou’s chest, blood and interstitial fluid had pooled in her ruptured lungs and the rest of her thoracic cavity. As Asclepius repaired the area, it attempted to clear her lungs by moving the fluid – along with the dissolved remnants of said arm – into the closest available open space: her stomach. Even if she’d been able to fully heal herself, her body wouldn’t have tolerated its presence for long.

She retched again, and a wave of soupy blue-black liquid, mostly congealed blood and dissolved tissue, surged up her throat and spilled onto the charred ground. The way her arm was positioned to keep her balance, it was in the way too, but the cramping of her damaged muscles was so painful the rest of her body was paralyzed. Pitou had retained a feline instinct for cleanliness, and the sensation of the warm, sticky liquid splashing over her hand and soaking through the sleeve of her jacket, combined with the metallic taste of blood – noticeably and disgustingly different from human blood – mixed with the bitterness of stomach acid, made her feel even sicker. Tears were streaming down her face now, half from the pain and half from another reflex, and mixing with the puddle of vomit. Even when it seemed like her stomach had to be completely empty, the cramps and spasms wouldn’t stop, and more kept coming up. She fell back onto her side, coughing and shivering.

Eventually the nausea subsided, but the pain didn’t. She was starting to get control of it enough to think clearly, though. Blood… she’d vomited blood. Coughing up a little wasn’t necessarily fatal since it could be caused by bleeding in the sinuses dripping into the throat, but with the amount that came up the only logical conclusion was severe internal bleeding, probably from a ruptured stomach. She was, technically, correct, but unaware that the damage had already been healed. Her pulse quickened. This was bad. Even with Doctor Blythe functional the surgery would be dangerous to perform on herself. She had to return to the palace.

Pitou tried to stand, but it was impossible. Her legs gave way under her weight, the right one crumpling with a sharp, stabbing pain that brought tears to her eyes again. Her left leg hurt, but balancing on it and hopping, even leaping forward should have been easy. But her body just wouldn’t respond. Her leg might have had the strength left to support her weight, if only just, but her head felt like it was filled with ice water. Her reactions were too slow to even keep her balance. What had happened to her Nen? For the first time, she noticed the circular area of destruction she lay in the center of. This had to have come from another attack, one she didn’t remember, but unconscious she should have been defenseless, and Gon should have killed her easily if he’d reached her. Again, she remembered her research on the brain. She knew it was possible for it to remain functional without forming memories – a ‘black-out.’ Evidently this was what had happened. Instead of falling unconscious, she had kept fighting, and somehow stayed alive for long enough to outlast Gon’s monstrous transformation.

Even though Pitou knew this was a victory, it felt like a failure. If she hadn’t let her sympathy for the boy overcome her judgement… she could have killed him. She could have killed him from the moment Pouf called her to tell her Komugi was no longer a hostage. And more than that, she realized, it scared her, the idea that she’d so completely lost control of her body. The loss of control now scared her, and so did the feeling of vulnerability that came with having her Nen defenses completely down. And with that fear came guilt. She was a Royal Guard. Her only thought should have been for the King’s safety. Her life was meaningless as long as he still lived. She shouldn’t have been feeling this kind of selfish fear. Even if she paid for her mistake with her life…

No… she couldn’t think that way. Regardless of her poor judgement, Pitou knew Gon was no longer a threat to the King. She’d succeeded at her mission. And she was confident that the other humans who’d attacked the palace weren’t a danger either. The selection was disrupted by the destruction of the palace, of course, and her incapacitation would delay it further. If the King decided that she had failed in her duty by letting this happen, she would gladly accept any punishment, including death. But until then, she could let herself be concerned with her own survival.

With her injuries she couldn’t afford to wait for her Nen to return on its own without getting to a safe location first. But she couldn’t walk. She couldn’t get back to the palace, not without help. Help… wait, that was it! The cell phone! She could contact… who, Pouf? With his ability it would certainly be easy for him to retrieve her without compromising his ability to perform other tasks. But lately she’d had a bad feeling about Pouf, and with the way he’d nearly gotten Komugi killed during the standoff with Gon, she was no longer sure he could be trusted. He wasn’t disloyal, exactly… she was sure he’d lay down his life for the King just like her and Youpi would, but he seemed like he believed he knew better than the King what was in his best interests. And if he believed Pitou was a bad influence… in her current state, it would be easy for him to kill her and claim she’d died in the battle against Gon. She hated to admit it, but Leol was more trustworthy at the moment. She knew his personality, but thanks to Shaiapouf helping him develop his Hatsu she also knew secondhand how it it worked. Leol would jump at the chance to have Pitou in his debt in exchange for a chance to borrow any of her abilities. He should have only seen Puppeteer and Doctor Blythe, neither of which he could do too much damage with in an hour assuming he didn’t take away her access to them at a critical time. And if he proved a problem, she could always just kill him.

But when Pitou tried to fish the phone out of her pocket, her hope vanished. Fragments of glass, metal, and shattered circuit boards fell through her fingers, covered in residue from the fire that had consumed the phone’s lithium battery after it ruptured. She stared at the last piece for a while, then let it too fall. “Damn it...” she whispered. She was stranded, with no Nen, unable to move and unable to communicate.

By the time Pitou dragged herself back to the old mansion, following the trail of snapped trees and furrowed ground, the sun was setting again. It was a distance she could normally have covered in seconds. A phone… there had to be a phone there somewhere. Cell phones were banned for most citizens in East Gorteau; a place like this had to have a land line to allow staff to communicate with other government facilities. She had to find it quickly… instead of her getting used to the pain it had just gotten worse as her body became more and more exhausted. She hadn’t thrown up any more blood, but that wasn’t a sign of safety; there could be still be internal bleeding elsewhere in her body. She still felt sick, and her throat burned from dry heaving so many times. Her head was still spinning, she felt alternately hot and cold, and most worryingly she’d already passed out multiple times. She knew these were all symptoms of severe blood loss. How long did she have?

When she finally located the phone, in a side room she suspected was a butler’s pantry, Pitou was on the edge of panic. It was becoming harder and harder to stay awake. It took all her strength to pull herself up onto an end table with her good arm so she could reach the buttons and receiver. She dialed Leol’s number, having to attempt it twice due to her hand shaking. The ringback tone played four times, then went to a default voicemail message. She waited for the piercing beep.

“Leol. This is Neferpitou. I need your help immediately. I have been severely injured in a fight with one of the invaders. I am unable to walk or use Nen, and may have internal injuries which could be life-threatening if left untreated. I am in a large human residence, which can be reached from the palace as follows...”

Pitou let out a sigh as she ended the message. No one had had any contact with Leol for several days. Was he even alive? She was pretty sure his subordinates, Hina and Flutter, were, but she wasn’t positive she remembered their numbers. There was a chance, though…

Two more voicemails. And Hina had even set hers. As she listened to the bubbly voice telling her that Hina might have lost her phone so it was better to just contact Leol or Flutter, Pitou tried not to cry from frustration. She dialed every number she could think of – Pouf, Bizef, any of the guard stations at the palace – her message growing more frantic with each attempt. The numbers on the keypad blurred, and she felt herself falling, but made no movement to catch herself. There was nothing else she could do. If this was how it ended… she had already accepted death at Gon’s hands. Was this how the boy felt? Pitou wondered as her consciousness slipped away again. When his borrowed power ran out, had he stumbled away into the forest to die, knowing he never intended to survive the battle anyway? Why did she tell him the truth? Why did she wait so long? For some reason, she had imagined herself in the human’s position, and didn’t want him to die blaming himself for being unable to save his ally. For some reason, she’d felt somehow guilty that her ability didn’t work, guilty that she had to kill a human, an enemy. There was something about him…

Then Pitou’s thoughts were cut short. She lay still and silent again, apart from her breathing and heartbeat, and didn’t move until she was discovered the next day by the Association Hunters sent to recover Kite’s body.