"Liam, give me your eyes."
Looking at the innocent, doll-like face of the kid sitting among the plush toys, asking for a body part as casually as if asking for a piece of candy, Liam suddenly understood exactly what had happened.
Fucking Greed Island. Fucking DICE. The autonomous system had actually thrown him directly into the Zoldyck family estate.
To make matters infinitely worse, the specific location where he had landed happened to be the heavily secured containment room of the most dangerous and secret child of the Zoldyck family. Alluka Zoldyck. Out of anywhere in the world, landing here was like diving headfirst into the absolute worst luck possible within the assassin nest.
However, right now, he had no choice but to immediately comply with Alluka's request.
The mechanics of this power were highly classified information that only Killua and a select few family members truly understood. But it obviously was not a secret to Liam, who possessed the meta-knowledge of a transmigrator. If you successfully satisfied Alluka's requests, the entity would grant you a single wish. But if you refused the requests three times in a row, the entity would violently crush you and at least one person you loved into a bloody meat patty, twisting your remains into a pretzel.
If he was crushed into a meat patty, the physical Star Mark on his body would definitely be completely destroyed. Death was inevitable in that scenario.
There were not many people he had deep connections with in this world, but Shizuku was definitely one of them. She would be instantly implicated and killed by the backlash if he refused.
Liam forced a tight, polite smile for Alluka. He raised his hand, stretched out two fingers, and without hesitation, dug out his own right eyeball while still completely conscious.
Damn it, Liam cursed in his mind. Asking for eyeballs right off the bat. Just what kind of absurd, massive wish did that greedy idiot ask for last time?
Liam gritted his teeth, enduring the sharp, severe pain that shot directly from his optical nerve straight into his brain. Blood dripped down his cheek as he carefully placed the wet, severed right eyeball into the small, waiting hands of the innocent-looking Alluka.
He knew how Alluka's ability to grant wishes worked. The bigger and more demanding the granted wish was, the more harsh and cruel the subsequent requests would become. In other words, the heavy, bloody price of making a massive wish would always be violently dumped onto the next poor person who happened to interact with the kid.
If someone had simply wished for Alluka to give them a hug, then the next request generated would probably just be asking the person to lift him up or play a game. But this time, the very first request upon seeing Liam was a demand for a human eyeball. That alone showed exactly how greedy the bastard who made the previous wish had been.
After Alluka received the eyeball, he just held it. It was actually of no real use to him. This was simply the mechanical onset of the ability. It was not like the kid actually wanted or needed the eyeball for anything.
Just as Alluka was about to casually toss the bloody orb aside, Liam reached out and took it right back.
"It is useless to you now, right?" Liam asked, his voice strained. "Then I will just take it back."
He pressed his hand over his empty, bleeding right eye socket. Although the intense self-healing ability of the Star Mark could easily just grow a brand new eye from scratch, it took less time and energy to just recycle the original parts.
Alluka sat perfectly still, staring blankly up at him with dark, empty eyes. Before the kid could open his mouth to make a second terrifying request, the room was suddenly illuminated.
Liam was struck violently by two thick beams of piercing red light falling directly from the ceiling. He felt a strange sensation, as if he were being tightly gripped by the jaws of a massive dragon made of pure light. He was ripped from the room instantly. Just like he had appeared out of thin air, he disappeared without a single trace.
In the security room somewhere else on the mountain, a glowing red dot reflected off the glass of a live surveillance monitor. A tall, elegant woman with voluminous curly hair, wearing a thick electronic visor that made her look exactly like Cyclops from the X-Men, watched the empty containment room of her fourth child in silence. After confirming the intruder was gone, Kikyo Zoldyck reached out with a gloved hand and pressed a heavy button on the main console.
"No way. Is this entire sequence over yet?"
Liam stood in the dark, covering his right eye as the lingering pain slowly faded. Before he had even gotten a chance to let his body adjust to his surroundings, he had been enveloped by that blinding light. It felt exactly like being teleported for a second time.
Was this the work of the Greed Island designer? No, Liam thought, shaking his head. This specific transition seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of Greed Island.
Liam recalled the exact moment of the teleport. It seemed to have been caused by something violently rushing into Alluka's containment area from the outside. No, that was not right either. It was a massive surge of external Nen. He had been suddenly locked onto and struck by a specialized Nen construct, and then he was dragged all the way into this dark, damp place.
"Is this an automated defense mechanism built into the Zoldyck family estate?" Liam wondered. "Does it automatically trigger when an uninvited guest breaches a highly sensitive area, forcibly relocating them to a specific holding zone?"
The lighting in the new room was incredibly dim. The surrounding environment was a blurry mess of shadows. Liam gently patted the skin around his right eye, which still felt raw and uncomfortable as the nerves reconnected. After taking a minute to let his vision adjust to the gloom, he realized this was actually a massive, cavernous space. The high ceilings and wide floor plan made it feel exactly like an ancient underground palace, or perhaps an abandoned underground parking garage.
There were absolutely no windows in sight, but the air felt surprisingly fresh, and the ventilation seemed perfectly adequate. That alone proved there had to be other viable entrances and exits connected to this chamber.
Liam was walking forward, lost in his own thoughts, when his foot suddenly snagged on something thick. He stumbled, catching his balance before he could fall.
He knelt down on the cold stone floor and squinted into the darkness.
Thick, heavy industrial cables were laid out in a chaotic, crisscrossing pattern all across the ground of the underground palace. Following the thickest bundle of cables with his eyes, Liam discovered a massive, imposing metal chair pushed up against the far wall. There seemed to be a small human figure sitting completely motionless in the chair, wrapped tightly in a mess of wires and heavy restraints.
Liam slowed his breathing and walked over quietly. When he got close enough to take a proper look, he stopped dead in his tracks, completely speechless.
It turned out to be Killua.
Killua was slumped in the metal seat, his head tilted sharply to the side. From a distance, sitting in the dark, anyone would have easily assumed he was a tortured prisoner who had just been brutally electrocuted to death. In reality, the young assassin was just sitting up and taking a nap. A long string of drool hung from the corner of his mouth as he slept deeply and soundly amidst the torture equipment.
Is this a place exclusively used for pain resistance training by the Zoldyck family? Liam thought, observing the high-voltage setup.
Liam remained perfectly calm. He had absolutely no desire to wake Killua up and explain his bizarre intrusion. He turned quietly on his heel and headed toward the far side of the room, following a faint draft of air that suggested an entrance.
As he walked, he constantly rubbed his thumb against the metal of the A ring on his finger. He pushed his aura into the band, desperately trying to use the Moon Mark to establish a communication link with Shizuku. But there was only dead silence on the other end.
The sensing range of the Moon Mark during daylight hours was far inferior to the vast network of the Star Mark.
Even knowing that, Liam did not rush to activate his direct connection to the Star Mark etched onto Shizuku's body. If Shizuku's current situation was highly critical or dangerous, and he rashly possessed her body without understanding her immediate surroundings, he could easily cause her to hesitate and get her killed. That would not be a good outcome at all.
"Fortunately, right before we were forcibly separated, I managed to give her and Bisky those Seventy-Two Transformations talismans," Liam muttered to himself. That powerful transformation ability should be more than enough to keep them safe, no matter where they landed.
As for Bisky, that was a genuine loss of contact. He had not marked her.
Not only did she not have a Moon Mark ring, but there was no Star Mark on her skin either. But considering Bisky's overwhelming, monstrous strength and decades of combat experience, there was really no need to worry about her safety.
Then there was Lumos and Jaku, the giant tiger and the small bird. He had absolutely no idea where those two had been thrown.
Fucking Greed Island, Liam sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. Since this was officially designated as a hidden level, should there not be some kind of massive completion reward or an exit prompt?
Then he remembered the conversation with Alain. The designer had explicitly stated he would use his administrative access to completely erase the required game process of the level. In other words, no matter what twisted, deadly scenario the die threw them into, they could just bypass it and directly find a normal way to escape back into the real world. This was effectively Alain forcefully replacing the deadly hidden level with a direct ticket off the island.
But who could have possibly predicted that exiting the island would mean being randomly dumped directly into the heavily fortified Zoldyck family estate?
Sorting through his chaotic thoughts, Liam finally reached the far wall and found the entrance. It was an incredibly thick, heavy double door made entirely of solid stone.
Liam pressed his hand flat against the cold surface. He braced his legs and pushed hard, using raw physical strength to force the stone door, which easily weighed hundreds of kilograms, to slowly grind open. A sliver of bright, clean light spilled into the dark torture chamber.
After only opening the door a few inches, Liam stopped and waited quietly in the shadows, listening for any movement outside. Suddenly, he let out a frustrated breath. He was so used to relying on Jaku for aerial drone reconnaissance before entering an unknown area. Not having the bird around was a serious tactical disadvantage.
After waiting for a full minute and hearing absolutely nothing, Liam decided the coast was clear. He slipped his body sideways through the narrow gap in the heavy doors.
The moment he stepped through, he was genuinely surprised. The space outside the door was not an outdoor courtyard or a natural cave. It was another massive, incredibly spacious indoor hall. The architecture was very similar to the dark electrocution chamber he had just left, except this room was flooded with bright, harsh overhead lighting. The floor here was composed entirely of a tight, crisscrossing metal grid, and there were no electrical cables in sight.
Liam took a single, cautious step forward onto the metal grid.
A tiny, almost inaudible mechanical scratching sound reached his ears.
Instantly, a long, incredibly sharp steel needle shot directly out of the wall, flying straight toward his right eye. Liam did not even flinch. He casually raised his hand, pinching the lethal projectile cleanly out of the air with two fingers.
He dropped the needle and took three more steps deeper into the hall.
Suddenly, the walls, ceiling, and floor erupted. A massive shower of razor-sharp steel needles flew at him from every conceivable direction and at a dozen different blind angles.
Liam twisted his body, dodging as many of the lethal projectiles as he physically could. But just as he was about to jump to the side, a small, strong hand suddenly grabbed the back of his shirt collar and violently yanked him backward.
He stumbled backward, crossing the threshold and returning directly into the dark electrocution chamber. The heavy stone door slammed completely shut with a deafening boom right in front of his face, sealing the bright hall away.
"The Capricorn Palace is completely loaded with lethal, pressure-sensitive traps. You cannot just wander around in there like an idiot."
The person who had suddenly yanked him back into the safety of the dark room was, naturally, the newly awakened Killua.
"Capricorn Palace?" Liam repeated, ignoring the lecture. He reached down and casually pulled several sharp steel needles out of his arm and thigh. He had let them hit him simply because he was too lazy to waste the energy completely dodging the barrage.
He paused, dropping the bloody needles onto the floor. "Why in the world is your house named after the Zodiac? Is this some elaborate Saint Seiya cosplay? Please tell me your assassin family doesn't have a Gemini Gold Saint pretending to be a Pope hiding somewhere in the basement."
Killua completely ignored the bizarre joke. He stepped closer, his sharp blue eyes locked onto Liam's arm.
"I can barely smell any fresh blood on you," Killua noted, his tone deadpan but laced with genuine curiosity. He stared intently at the exact spots where Liam had just violently yanked the steel out of his own flesh. "The wounds are already sealing shut. Did you actively use your muscle fibers to forcefully clamp down and close the puncture wounds? It was just a few tiny pricks. There is really no need to make such a massive fuss and burn energy doing that. Or could it be that your body's natural cellular healing ability is just incredibly, freakishly strong?"
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