Chapter 2: Duel at Dawn
The rooftop was a blade of polished darkness against the bleeding sky. Dawn wasn't breaking so much as the city was exhaling a slow, tired red glow from its horizon-long wound. Killua stood at the edge, the wind pulling at his hair, the scent of coming rain and distant traffic swirling around him. Veridian Tower stretched beneath his feet, a monument to greed and stolen potential. His ribs ached, a dull echo of Silva’s fist—a father’s lesson lingering in his bones.
He’d bypassed the layered security with a kind of bored precision. Motion sensors were fooled by a delayed afterimage. Keycard readers sparked and died under a focused surge of electricity. He’d left a trail of disabled systems and unconscious guards, each one a silent testament to the intruder they never saw. The client’s data chip had been thorough, but incomplete. It didn’t account for the two additional silent sentries on the 78th-floor landing, their Nen signatures masked until he was already past them. Amateurs.
His target, Aris Thorne, was a creature of habit. The file said he started his day here, at the apex of his kingdom, doing a tai chi routine as the city woke. A man who stole the essence of others performing an act of calm. The hypocrisy was almost artistic.
Killua stepped onto the main rooftop terrace, a vast space of black marble and recessed lighting. The only sound was the mournful howl of the wind through the ventilation shafts.
And the quiet, deliberate click of a safety being disengaged.
He didn’t flinch. He just turned his head, a slow pivot.
She stood twenty feet away, framed by the skeletal outline of a giant, decommissioned air-conditioning unit. The first bloody streaks of dawn lit her from behind, turning her into a silhouette haloed in fire. He knew the shape of her, the set of her shoulders, even before his eyes adjusted to the gloom.
Heaven.
She wore sleek, tactical gear, matte black like his own, but tailored. A long, dark coat billowed slightly in the wind. In her hands was a compact, customized rifle, its muzzle unwavering, centered on his chest. But more than the gun, the air around her shimmered. Her Nen was a visible, swirling mist of violet and gunmetal grey, an aura that felt sharp, cold, and utterly focused.
Time didn’t slow. It crystallized. The hum of the city below faded into a blank white noise.
“You’re early,” Killua said. His voice was calm, flat. A desktop observation.
“You’re predictable,” Heaven replied. Her voice was lower than he remembered, scraped raw by something. Not time. Something else. “I knew they’d send someone. The stewards are panicking. I just didn’t think they’d be stupid enough to send you.”
Her rifle didn’t waver. The Nen around it condensed, the mist solidifying into razor-edged geometric patterns along the barrel. A Hatsu ability he didn’t recognize. Something new. Something forged in the years since he’d seen her.
He kept his hands loose at his sides, his own aura a controlled, almost invisible static field. “This isn’t a steward job. It’s freelance.”
A harsh, short laugh escaped her. It held no humor. “Right. Because you’re all about the independent contract now. The lone wolf. That’s the story, isn’t it?” Her finger tightened on the trigger guard. “You left. You walked away from the Arena, from the legacy… from me. To forge your own path. And now you’re here, doing someone else’s dirty work on a skyscraper rooftop. How’s that path feeling, Killua? All noble and self-determined?”
The words were bullets. Each one found a mark he’d thought was armored over.
“This is different,” he said, the lie tasting weak even to him.
“Is it?” She took one step forward. The geometric patterns on her rifle glowed brighter. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks the same. You’re the Zoldyck attack dog, just off its leash. They whistle, you bite. Even when you pretend you’re choosing the hand that feeds you.”
“Heaven,” he started, a negotiation in a single word.
“Don’t.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Don’t say my name. You lost the right.” Her eyes, finally visible as the light grew, were chips of frozen amethyst. The anger in them was a living thing, honed and cared for. “You took everything from me. My standing. My trust. My future. You made me look weak. You made me a punchline.” She breathed in, a shaky, controlled inhale. “Now I’m going to take everything from you. Starting with this kill. Ending with your reputation. I’m going to bury you in the shadow of the legacy you crapped on.”
He understood now. This wasn’t a coincidence. She wasn’t here for Veridian. She was here for him. The client, Mr. Reed, the stewards… they’d either set this up or, more likely, Heaven had her own sources. She’d intercepted the contract. She was the variable Reed had warned about.
“Thorne is mine, Heaven,” Killua said, his voice dropping into a colder register. The playful assassin was gone, replaced by the product of the black stone training hall. “Walk away. This doesn’t need to be us.”
“It was always going to be us,” she hissed. “The moment you turned your back.”
Her Nen flared. The geometric shapes on the rifle detached, becoming swirling, independent blades of solidified aura orbiting the muzzle. Kinetic-Channeling: Fragment Shot. She didn’t speak the name; he just knew. Her ability had evolved.
She fired.
But Killua was already a smear of motion. The rifle’s report was swallowed by the wind. He didn’t dodge the bullet; he dodged the fracturing cloud of Nen-blades that erupted from it in mid-air, homing in on him like angry wasps. They sliced through the space where he’d been, scoring deep grooves into the black marble.
He flickered forward, electricity crackling along his arm. He didn’t aim for her. He aimed for the rifle. A bolt of blue-white light snapped from his fingertip, straight for the weapon’s mechanism.
Her Nen-mist thickened around the gun. The lightning hit the violet haze and fragmented, grounding out harmlessly into the rooftop with a smell of ozone and burnt stone. She’d predicted that. She’d studied him.
He closed the distance, a zigzag blur. Hand as a blade, aiming for her wrist.
She dropped the rifle, letting it hang on its sling, and met him hand-to-hand. Her blocks were brutal, efficient. Not Zoldyck-style, not Arena-style. Something else. Something born of pure, focused fury. She was faster than he remembered. Stronger.
“You’ve been training,” he grunted, parrying a knife-hand strike that vibrated up to his elbow.
“I’ve been living,” she spat back, sweeping his legs. “While you’ve been running.”
He flipped over the sweep, landing in a crouch. Her boot came down where his head had been, cracking the marble. He lunged up, inside her guard, leading with his shoulder.
It was like hitting a wall of tempered steel. Her reinforced Nen flared, a violet shockwave throwing him back. He skidded, his shoes scraping on the smooth stone.
They faced each other again, ten feet apart. The sky was lighter now, a dirty orange washing out the red. The city below was beginning to hum with morning life, oblivious to the duel on its ceiling.
Heaven’s chest rose and fell steadily. Her expression was a mask of cold fury, but her eyes were calculating. Assessing. “You’re holding back,” she stated.
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“Too bad.”
She didn’t go for the rifle this time. She charged, her hands glowing with that same sharp, geometric Nen. She wasn’t just reinforcing herself; she was turning her limbs into living weapons. Every punch, every kick carried a projected, slicing force.
He was forced to match her. Lightning sheathed his hands. The claps of their impacts weren't sounds of flesh, but of concussive energy—thunderous booms that echoed out over the empty rooftop. Each collision sent showers of sparks and pulverized stone into the air. He was faster, his movements a fluid dance of instinct and decades of drilled-in violence. But she was relentless, a force of pure, unbending will. Her Nen didn't waver. It was solid, like grief turned to diamond.
He saw an opening. A micro-hesitation as she shifted her weight for a roundhouse kick. A Zoldyck would have taken it, shattered her knee. He didn't. He flowed inside the kick and pushed her, using her own momentum to send her staggering past him.
She recovered instantly, whirling, a blade of Nen extending from her fingertips like a shimmering violet claw. It grazed his side, slicing through fabric and skin. A line of fire burned across his ribs. Warm blood soaked his shirt.
He looked down at the cut, then back at her. Something in his eyes shifted. The last vestige of hesitation bled away, replaced by a familiar, chilling calm.
“Okay,” he said softly.
He vanished.
Godspeed wasn’t just speed. It was the removal of thought, of doubt, of all resistance between intention and action. He was behind her. His hand, sheathed in crackling, focused voltage, was poised at the base of her skull. One surge would overload her nervous system. It wouldn't kill her. Not if he controlled it. But it would end the fight.
She didn't turn. She let out a shuddering breath. The violet Nen around her sputtered and died.
“Do it,” she whispered, her voice suddenly hollow. “Finish it. Be the perfect weapon you were always meant to be.”
His hand trembled. The electricity flickered, desperate for release. He saw the back of her neck, the loose strands of hair stuck to her skin with sweat. He saw a different rooftop, years ago, a sunset instead of a sunrise, her laughter instead of her hate.
He couldn't.
The aura around his hand died.
In that instant, Heaven moved. Not to attack, but to spin, to lunge not at him, but past him. She snatched her rifle from where it hung. He was still re-centering, the cost of dropping Godspeed a sudden lag in his reflexes.
She didn't aim at him. She aimed at the rooftop access door, thirty yards away, just as it hissed open.
Aris Thorne stepped out, dressed in immaculate white linens for his morning routine. He was taller than his photos suggested, with a placid, serene face. He paused, taking in the scene: the scorch marks, the cracked marble, the two assassins frozen in their tableau of violence.
His eyes met Killua's. Then Heaven's.
A smile touched his lips. Not a smile of fear, but of delight.
“Oh,” Thorne said, his voice a warm, melodic baritone. “The stewards sent two. How resourceful.”
Heaven fired.
The Nen-blade cluster shot from her rifle, a buzzing, violet-hued swarm screaming toward Thorne’s heart.
Thorne didn’t move.
From the shadows behind him, a figure blurred. It was a man, dressed in the simple grey uniform of a Veridian maintenance worker. His hand shot out, and a swirling, vortex-like shield of amber Nen erupted in the air before Thorne. Heaven’s Fragment Shot hit the vortex and was absorbed, the energy dissolving with a sound like shattering glass.
The maintenance man stepped fully into the light. He had a bland, forgettable face.
It was Mr. Reed.
“Hello again, Mr. Zoldyck,” Reed said, his voice the same smooth, empty tone from the cedar vault. He looked at Heaven. “And Miss Celeste. A pleasure. We did wonder if you’d intercept our little invitation.”
Heaven’s face went pale with a dawning, horrible understanding. Killua felt the same ice in his veins.
The contract. The chip. The breadcrumbs to Veridian Tower. It was never about Thorne.
It was bait. For both of them.
Thorne clasped his hands behind his back, beaming at them like a professor with two prize students. “Two of the most promising, untethered assets from the Arena’s old catalog,” he mused. “The elusive lightning wielder and the adaptive kinetic channeler. Your fight was… instructive. The data we’ve collected this morning is invaluable.” He glanced at Reed. “See? Told you the personal touch works best.”
Reed nodded. “The emotional resonance certainly amplifies the Nen signatures. Excellent for sampling.”
Killua looked from Thorne’s serene face to Reed’s blank one. The rooftop, the city, Heaven’s fury—it all shrunk into a single, horrifying point. They weren’t here to stop Anthology.
They were here to feed it.
Heaven’s rifle was still raised, but her aim was wavering. Her eyes, wide with rage moments before, were now wide with a shock that mirrored his own.
“Run,” Killua mouthed to her, the word silent.
But it was too late. All around the rooftop perimeter, more figures in grey uniforms melted from the shadows, their auras igniting—a discordant choir of stolen, patchwork Nen abilities flickering to life. The trap wasn’t just sprung.
It had been the plan all along.
It had been the plan all along.
A dry, hollow laugh escaped Killua’s throat. He looked from Thorne’s smug face to the circle of closing grey uniforms, their auras a sickly kaleidoscope of stolen potential. “You subcontract your field testing now, Reed? Couldn’t get enough from the little chip you gave me?”
“Observation in a controlled environment has limits,” Reed replied, his tone flat as data. “Field stress-testing provides richer metrics. Your emotional states, especially… quite volatile. Excellent for calibration.”
Heaven hadn’t lowered her rifle. She was staring at Thorne, her breath coming in short, sharp clouds in the cold air. The realization wasn’t just in her mind; it was in the set of her jaw, the tremor in her arms holding the weapon. They’d used her rage. They’d used her. The ultimate humiliation.
“Calibration,” she repeated, the word tasting like ash.
Thorne took a step forward, spreading his hands. “Your abilities are extraordinary raw materials. That fracturing kinetic effect, Miss Celeste—imagine it stabilizing a micro-portal. And Mr. Zoldyck, your conductive electromagnetism… perfect for neural bridge overloads.” His eyes gleamed with a collector’s fervor. “The Anthology doesn’t just archive. It iterates. Improves. You’ll be part of the next evolution.”
“I’d rather be obsolete,” Killua spat.
He was already mapping the perimeter. Seven grey suits. Reed. Thorne. The access door was blocked. The drop was eighty stories. The math was terrible, but not impossible. He could feel the electricity building in his core, a storm held in check, waiting for a path. His side burned where Heaven’s Nen-blade had grazed him.
One of the grey suits, a woman with close-cropped hair and hands that shimmered with heat-haze, lunged. She moved with disjointed speed, her ability jerky, like a marionette with cut strings. A stolen, poorly integrated power.
Killua didn’t meet the charge. He sidestepped, his hand shooting out to tap her forearm as she passed. A precise, high-voltage surge. Her body seized, the stolen Nen flickering and dying as her nervous system overloaded. She dropped, twitching. One down.
The reaction was immediate. The other six converged.
Chaos erupted in a burst of mismatched colors and sensations. A man projected sharpened sound waves that shattered the remaining glass light fixtures. Another exhaled a cloud of corrosive mist. They were clumsy, powerful but unrefined, like children playing with live weapons. Dangerous because they didn’t know how not to be.
Killua became a ghost in the cacophony. He moved on instinct, a series of near-misses and devastating, economical touches. A jab to a throat here, a severed tendon there. He was dismantling a machine. But for every one he dropped, two more seemed to press in, their abilities creating a dangerous, overlapping mess.
He saw Heaven from the corner of his eye. She wasn't fighting the greysuits. She was weaving through them, a violet streak of focused intent, heading not for the exit, but for the central structural column of the rooftop machinery housing.
Her rifle was gone, slung across her back. In her hands now was her Nen, shaped differently. It wasn't blades anymore. It was a concentrated, pulsing orb of violent energy, swirling like a miniature galaxy, sucking in the loose fragments of her previous attacks and the dissipating auras of the fallen grey suits.
She was feeding it.
“Heaven!” Killua barked, ducking a whip made of solidified shadow. “The hell are you doing?”
She reached the massive, painted-steel column that anchored the ventilation units. She placed her glowing, swirling orb against it. The metal didn't just dent; it began to disintegrate, flaking away into nothing at the point of contact, the effect spreading in voracious, crawling lines.
She looked over her shoulder, her eyes meeting his. All the anger was still there, but it had been refined into something cold and absolute. A decision.
“You heard him,” she yelled over the din. The wind whipped her words away. “We’re just data to them. Raw materials.” She pressed the orb deeper. A deep, resonant groan emanated from the tower beneath their feet. “So I’m corrupting the sample.”
Thorne’s serene mask finally cracked. “Stop her!” he screamed at Reed, his voice shrill. “She’ll collapse the entire spire!”
Reed moved, but not towards Heaven. He moved towards Killua, his bland face intent. “The lightning-wielder is the priority. Subdue. Extract.”
The remaining three grey suits redirected their chaotic assault towards Killua, pinning him in a crossfire of corrosive mist and concussive sound. He pivoted, lightning arcing from his body to form a crackling, temporary shield. The mist hissed against it, the sound waves warping the air. He was trapped.
Heaven’s orb was halfway through the column now. The steel was singing a terrible, high-pitched song of stress. The entire rooftop deck tilted an inch, then two, with a grating scream of tearing metal.
“The data’s not even here, is it?” Killua shouted at Reed, straining against the pressure of the converging attacks.
Reed didn’t answer. He just watched, analyzing.
“It doesn’t matter!” Heaven called back. Her voice was raw, triumphant. “This place is a symbol. His monument.” She glanced at Thorne, who was now backing towards the access door, his white linens flapping. “I’m burning the library down.”
With a final, convulsive pulse of her will, the orb consumed the last integrity of the column. There was a sound like a mountain sighing.
Then the world dropped.
The rooftop didn’t just collapse; it buckled, the center swallowing itself in a vortex of tearing steel and shattering marble. Killua’s lightning shield faltered as the floor fell away beneath him. He was falling, then sliding, then free-falling through a cascade of debris.
He caught a glimpse of Heaven, leaping backward, using a released pulse of kinetic force from her hands to propel herself towards the building's main facade. She wasn't trying to escape the collapse. She was riding it.
Grey suits tumbled past him, screaming. Reed was a blur of amber light, creating platforms of solid Nen to step on as he descended calmly through the chaos, his eyes still locked on Killua.
A jagged spear of rebar ripped past Killua’s face. He twisted in the air, aiming his body towards the building's side. Eighty stories of glass and steel rushed up to meet him.
He channeled every volt into his fingertips and slammed his charged hands against the shimmering windows. The glass didn't just break; it vaporized into a superheated cloud, and the electricity surged through the building's skeleton, searching for a ground. For a moment, he hung there, embedded in a smoking, molten hole on the 78th floor, the wind screaming through the gap.
Debris rained down past him into the yawning chasm of the tower's central atrium. The groan of failing structural beams was a living sound.
He hauled himself inside, rolling onto a pristine, empty office floor now shaking like a ship in a storm. Sparks showered from the ceiling. Through the new, ragged opening in the wall, he saw the top of the tower lean, then shear clean off, a million tons of steel and ambition beginning a slow, gravitational pivot towards the city below.
She’d actually done it.
A figure landed lightly in the wreckage of a nearby cubicle farm, sending monitors crashing. It was Heaven. Dust and soot streaked her face. One of her sleeves was torn, revealing a long, bloody gash. She was breathing hard, but her eyes were bright, almost feverish.
They stared at each other across fifty feet of trembling, corporate wasteland.
The building around them uttered a final, deep-throated protest. The floor tilted sharply.