Chapter 158: Chrollo Can Go Sit at Char's Table
Ever since Shizuku joined, every cleanup job the Phantom Troupe needed done had become significantly easier.
Under normal circumstances, bodies were a liability. They were the most direct and actionable evidence available to anyone trying to trace a killer, and making them disappear was the single most effective way to slow down anyone who might come looking for answers. Shizuku's Deme-King vacuum could permanently dispose of bodies and rapidly pack large quantities of items at the same time. As long as someone tracked down a location to unload everything before Shizuku forgot what she'd taken in, it functioned as an enormous portable storage space.
In other words: even though Shizuku had been with them for less than three years and was one of the newer members, she was functionally irreplaceable.
Which was why her sudden disappearance put a jolt through every Troupe member still inside the underground auction venue.
As Ross had correctly assessed, the Troupe had assembled its full roster in Yorknew City, but this particular operation had not gone out at full strength. They'd split roughly in half.
The members currently participating in the silencing operation at the auction venue were Uvogin, Shalnark, Machi, Franklin, Bonolenov, and Shizuku. Compared to the original timeline's equivalent period, Feitan and Nobunaga were permanently gone, with Bonolenov filling in as the replacement.
At the same time, back at the temporary safehouse, Chrollo was accompanied by Pakunoda, Kortopi, Hisoka, and one new face: a replacement for the deceased Phinks, now the Troupe's new No. 5, a name that translated roughly as Lü Tu. He was a demon who had largely retained a human shape.
Whether or not losing three founding members had pushed Chrollo to reconsider, the leader who had never previously intended to let a demon join the Troupe had broken that rule.
Even as an A-class criminal organization, the Phantom Troupe didn't take just anyone, which meant filling the gaps was going slower than expected. Lü Tu had only been in for two or three months and was still in the settling-in phase. Work that required high trust and tight coordination wasn't something he'd be involved in yet.
When Uvogin's call came through, the expression on Chrollo's face that had remained steady through everything clouded over.
Shizuku was missing. From a purely operational standpoint, that might actually be more damaging than losing two or three combat-role members whose job descriptions already factored in the possibility of sacrifice.
The one silver lining was that Machi, who had developed a new ability, reported that Shizuku was missing but not dead. Her Instinct Nen Needle was still getting a signal. That almost certainly meant she had been taken, not killed.
"What do we do, boss?"
Uvogin's voice on the other end of the call was calm.
It might seem counterintuitive, but Uvogin genuinely was the most hot-blooded member in the Troupe, the kind who would throw a punch if he disagreed with a single word you said, someone whose muscles moved faster than his brain on most occasions. Yet whenever the team went out on a collective operation without Chrollo present, the operational core of the smaller unit defaulted to Uvogin, not Shalnark or Franklin, the two who were otherwise the steadying forces within the group.
Uvogin's nature was this: the moment someone around him needed him, or more bluntly, the moment there was someone in danger of being left behind, his thinking went colder, and the ceiling on his strength went up.
Of course, the reason he was managing calm right now was also largely because Machi had said Shizuku was still alive. If she hadn't, he would most likely already have gone off.
With Shizuku missing, the fact that the auction items had been cleared out in advance had already become irrelevant.
"Mission objective changes. Follow Machi's instinct and pursue. We'll move out immediately and link up with you."
Chrollo paused.
"As for the items being moved early, I have a theory. We'll talk when we're face to face."
The call ended. He set aside the aluminum can of non-alcoholic beer he had absently crushed flat while talking and stood up, sweeping a look across the room.
Machi had said Shizuku was alive, but Chrollo felt the same acute helplessness that had hit him during the Castlevania losses. Like something in the shadows was working against him specifically.
That helplessness drove a sharper craving underneath it.
If he could know in advance what was coming for the Troupe, could he sidestep these sudden disasters entirely?
On that thought, Chrollo's hand moved instinctively to an inside pocket of his coat and found a photograph there. He had obtained it through an intermediary: a photo of the eldest daughter of the Dracula Family, formerly the Nostrad Family, a woman who almost never appeared publicly but had come to Yorknew City for the auction. A woman who was rumored to possess one-hundred-percent-accurate divination ability.
The photo was fresh. It had been taken the previous day by airport staff as its subject was stepping off an airship.
From the moment Castlevania had relocated to the former Nostrad compound, Chrollo had added both Castlevania and the Nostrad Family to his list of entities under close observation. The same way he'd handled the Zoldyck Family once: watch, don't touch. He had learned that lesson.
When facing something stronger, a spider waits. Observes. Spins its web and lets its venom build, then moves only when the moment is right.
The Nostrad Family's entire foundation had been built on Neon's divination service, so Chrollo had obtained the relevant intelligence without much difficulty. A large portion of the crime world had dismissed it as a con, but a significant number of bosses had been quietly renewing contracts with the Nostrad Family on a regular basis. That alone said plenty about whether there was something real behind it.
Chrollo didn't believe in divination as such. He would put it down to some enhanced version of Machi's instinct: a Nen ability that produced genuinely useful predictive output.
Combined with the fact that his team had hit the auction, killed everyone inside, and still found the items already cleared out in advance, Chrollo had more than enough reason to believe that one of the bosses with decision-making authority had consulted the Nostrad Family's divination service and acted on it by moving the items early.
At the same time, he was fairly confident the prediction had not specifically named the Phantom Troupe.
Chrollo had a clear-eyed view of the Troupe's reputation in the criminal world. The A-class designation carried genuine infamy, enough to keep children awake at night with the name alone. If whoever received that prediction had known the attackers were the Phantom Troupe specifically, the security on site would not have been the kind that a handful of capable Nen ability users could tear through.
"Let's move. Link up with Uvogin and the others."
With a clearer plan now taking shape, Chrollo issued the order to the Troupe members around him.
At the same moment, Uvogin's group, escaping by hot air balloon in a body, had abandoned their originally planned route toward the Gordeau Desert and were pushing in the direction Machi's Instinct Nen Needle was pointing.
As for Ross.
He had rented a long-haul refrigerated transport truck and was directing his people to load the mountains of food they had bought from every corner of the city, crate by crate, into the cold storage cargo hold.
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