Chapter 3: The Harvest
The floor lurched again, a sickening seesaw tilt that sent a waterfall of loose papers, shattered monitors, and an entire executive desk sliding past them into the gaping hole where the windows used to be. The shriek of tortured steel was a constant now, the building’s death rattle. Dust rained from fissures spiderwebbing across the ceiling.
Killua braced himself against the frame of a shattered interior window, his boots slipping on the tilting polished concrete. Across the widening gap, Heaven clung to a structural pillar, her fingers digging into the drywall. The raw, triumphant fury in her eyes had banked into something harder: the grim acknowledgment of shared freefall.
“We need to move,” Killua yelled over the roar. Not a suggestion. A tactical imperative.
“No kidding,” she shot back, her gaze flicking past him, over his shoulder. Her expression changed. “Incoming!”
He didn’t look. He felt it—a pressure shift in the chaotic Nen swirling in the air, a thread of cold, amber precision weaving through the storm. He pushed off the wall, launching himself sideways as a thick, rope-like chain of solidified golden Nen smashed through the space he’d occupied, punching a neat, circular hole through the floor and the thirty stories beneath it.
Reed landed amidst the debris with the quiet finality of a door closing. His grey uniform was immaculate. No dust touched him. The amber chains retracted into swirling vortexes around his forearms. His eyes, flat and analytic, took them in.
“Specimen retrieval protocol is still active,” he stated, his voice carrying perfectly through the noise. It was the tone of a technician reciting a failed system alert. “Cease unnecessary resistance. Structural failure is irrelevant to the process.”
“You’re a real poet, you know that?” Killua muttered, electricity beginning to spit and crackle around his fists. The cut on his side pulled tight, a bright line of pain.
Heaven didn’t speak. She moved. A focused kinetic pulse, invisible but for the ripple in the air, shot from her palm toward Reed’s head. It wasn’t meant to kill; it was a disruptor, aimed to stun, to create an opening.
Reed’s head tilted a fraction. An amber disc, like a miniature shield, materialized in the air before him. Heaven’s pulse hit it and shattered harmlessly. He didn’t even blink.
“Kinetic Type A, Variant Seven. Suppression recommended.” Reed’s words were for an invisible log. One of the chains lashed out, not at Heaven, but at the pillar she held. It didn’t strike. It wrapped, constricting, and began to pulse with a deep, resonating light. The pillar groaned, and then the entire section of floor around Heaven’s feet began to dissolve, not into dust, but into fine, glowing particulate that flowed toward Reed’s vortexes.
He was harvesting the building itself, converting matter into raw Nen fuel.
Heaven abandoned her perch, flipping backward as the floor vanished beneath her. She landed badly, one knee buckling on the shifting slope. Reed’s other chain snaked toward her ankles.
Killua was already in motion. Godspeed wasn’t an option; the footing was too unstable, the geometry of the room dissolving by the second. But his speed was still a product of a lifetime in chaos. He intersected the chain’s path, a blade-hand sheathed in white-hot voltage chopping down.
The lightning met the amber Nen.
There was no clean cut. Instead, a soundless, blinding feedback scream erupted. Killua’s electricity, a wild, conductive force, didn’t break the chain—it fused with it. The amber energy, a perfect, sterile conduit, amplified and rebroadcast the volatile charge back at its source and out into the environment in a crackling web.
Heaven, scrambling to her feet, saw the storm of feedback erupting around Killua. Instinct overrode thought. Her own Nen flared, a violent violet corona. She didn’t try to shield him. She did the opposite. She slammed a kinetic blast into the epicenter of the feedback loop, not to dampen it, but to push.
Her force met his runaway current inside Reed’s own absorption chain.
The fusion was accidental. Catastrophic.
The world didn’t explode. It unzipped.
Space itself tore above Reed with a sound like a thousand sheets of glass splitting. It wasn’t a hole into darkness. It was a rift into a blinding, sterile white luminescence. And the hum that poured out of it wasn’t mechanical. It was organic. A low, collective, hopeless thrum, like the slowed heartbeat of a dying leviathan.
The amber chains snapped back into Reed, his calm finally broken into sharp surprise. He took a step back, looking up.
Killua followed his gaze, the feedback sting still tingling in his hands.
Through the rift, he saw a room. An endless, cavernous space that defied the building’s actual dimensions. The walls, floor, and ceiling were seamless, glowing white polymer.
And suspended in it, row upon row, column upon column, were the pods.
Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Clear cylinders, each filled with pale green nutrient fluid. And inside each one, a person. Men, women, some barely older than kids. They floated, motionless, eyes closed, faces peaceful in a way that felt obscene. Tubes fed into nostrils, mouths. Electroodes spiderwebbed across shaved scalps. Their auras—their stolen, siphoned auras—were visible as faint, spectral colors bleeding from the pods into a central, tangled nexus of light that pulsed like a diseased heart at the room’s core.
The Anthology wasn’t a database. It was a farm.
The scent hit them next, cutting through the dust and ozone: the antiseptic, sugary smell of nutrient fluid, undercut by the faint, coppery smell of blood and the flat, dry odor of static.
“Subjects 744 through 1021,” Reed said, his voice regaining its monotone, but faster now. A hint of urgency. “Primary storage array. This rift is a containment breach.”
Heaven was staring, her breath caught in her throat. All the anger, the fight, had drained from her face, leaving a hollow, sick realization. “My cousin,” she whispered, the words raw. “Alicia. She vanished after a routine recon in Kukuroo… they said she deserted.”
She took a step toward the shimmering rift, her hand outstretched as if she could touch one of the distant pods.
“Don’t,” Killua said, but it was too late.
Reed’s hands came up. The vortexes on his arms spun violently. The rift pulsed, and the humming intensified. From the glowing nexus at the heart of the pod farm, tendrils of stolen energy—mimics of a dozen different Nen types—speared through the rift toward them. A whip of fiery heat. A claw of jagged ice. A wave of disorienting psychic pressure.
This was the true function of Reed’s Nen. Not just absorption. Administration. He was a living terminal for the archive, able to draw on and deploy any ability stored within it.
The attacks weren’t finessed. They were brutal, overwhelming broadcasts of stolen power. Killua dove, pulling Heaven down with him as a spear of crystalline rock erupted from the floor where she’d been standing.
“We can’t fight that here!” he snarled in her ear. The floor beneath them was barely holding. The rift shimmered, unstable, but Reed was focusing on stabilizing it, on pulling them in.
“We have to go in,” Heaven said, her eyes fixed on the pods. There was no anger left. Just a cold, terrible resolve. “We go in, or we die here. And they keep harvesting.”
It was suicidal. It was the only move left.
Reed advanced, the stolen abilities swirling around him in a kaleidoscope of lethal potential. “Compliance will reduce discomfort,” he intoned.
Killua met Heaven’s eyes. For the first time since the rooftop, it wasn’t a clash. It was an assessment. A grim, silent negotiation in a split second. He gave a single, sharp nod.
He grabbed her arm. He didn’t use Godspeed. He used every ounce of pure, directional force he could muster from his legs and jumped. Not away from the rift.
Toward it.
Heaven didn’t resist. At the apex of their leap, as Reed’s conjured storm of abilities converged on them, she threw her hands out behind them. A final, colossal kinetic blast, not aimed at Reed, but at the crumbling floor and the remaining structural supports of the 78th story.
The world behind them disappeared in a cataclysm of shearing metal and exploding concrete.
The propulsion shot them forward like a bullet from a gun, straight into the blinding white light of the rift. The last thing Killua saw was Reed’s impassive face, a hand raised, not in attack, but in a gesture of remote, frustrated recall.
Then the sounds of the dying tower vanished. The cold city wind was gone.
There was only the hum.
The sterile, chilling air.
And the silent, suspended forms of hundreds of stolen people, stretching away into a glowing, endless horizon.
The hum was a physical thing, a low-frequency vibration that made their teeth ache and their bones feel thin. It wasn't just sound; it was the exhale of a hundred stolen breaths, synchronized and sterile. Killua landed in a crouch, the polished white floor cool and frictionless under his palms, while Heaven hit the ground beside him in a roll that ended against the base of a glowing pod.
The body inside was a young man with close-cropped hair and a network of thin tubes taped to his neck. His aura, a weak, flickering yellow, was being siphoned away in a thin, shimmering stream that fed into a central conduit in the ceiling.
"God," Heaven breathed, pushing herself up. Her voice was swallowed by the vastness. She pressed a hand against the cool glass. "They're all just… alive enough."
Killua stood slowly. The air was filtered, odorless except for that underlying antiseptic sweetness. It was the smell of a hospital designed by machines. Lights embedded in the floor cast their features in stark, shadowless relief. His own reflection looked back at him from a dozen pod surfaces, a ghost among ghosts.
"This is what Reed meant by iteration," he said. His words fell flat, no echo in the endless space.
"These aren't just archives. They're batteries." Heaven's knuckles were white where she gripped the pod. "He wasn't cataloging techniques. He was harvesting the people."
A soft, hydraulic hiss echoed from somewhere deep in the grid. They both froze. It was a different sound from the pervasive hum—a mechanical punctuation. A scanner node, a small orb of polished metal, detached from a track on the ceiling and glided silently toward them, a single red lens rotating with a faint whir.
Killua’s hand shot out. A thread-thin arc of electricity snapped from his fingertip, precise as a surgeon's scalpel. It pierced the orb’s casing. There was a muted pop, a wisp of smoke, and it dropped, clattering harmlessly on the floor.
The silence that followed was heavier. They both knew that was a tripwire.
"Every system has a heart," Killua muttered, scanning the forest of pods. The shimmering streams of stolen aura all flowed in one direction, toward the distant core of the room where the light pulsed brighter. "A control nexus. A brain."
"He said 'primary storage array,'" Heaven replied, her eyes tracking the lines of stolen energy. "That implies a secondary. A backup." She finally looked at him, the violet of her irises almost luminous in the reflected glow. "We can't save them all. Not from in here."
The statement hung between them, a brutal, shared calculus.
"We find the core," Killua said, starting to walk. His boots made no sound. "We break the siphon. That's a start."
"He'll be waiting there. Reed. Or something worse."
"Probably."
He started moving between the rows, a phantom in a gallery of the damned. Heaven fell into step beside him, not quite at his shoulder, but close enough. The space warped perspective; after a hundred yards, it felt like they hadn't moved at all, the same configuration of pods repeating into infinity.
They passed a woman with distinctive, swirling tattoos covering her arms. Subject 822. A man missing an ear. Subject 901. A girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen. Subject 1015. Killua’s stomach turned to stone.
"Target the families," Heaven said quietly, as if reading the cold dread in his posture. "The independents. The ones without a powerful house to come looking. That's their selection criteria."
"Like me," Killua said. The word hung there. A freelance assassin. A runaway heir. Perfect prey.
"Like us," she corrected, her voice harder.
Another scanner orb glided into view ahead. Then another, from a perpendicular row. Three more descended from above. They were being herded.
"Plan?" Heaven asked, her hands flexing at her sides, violet energy beginning to swirl around her fingertips like liquid smoke.
"Same as always." Killua felt the static rise in his blood, a welcome, furious heat against the sterile cold. "Break everything."
He didn't wait for the orbs to converge. He exploded forward. Not with Godspeed's totality, but with a controlled, devastating burst. He became a blur of blue-white light, zig-zagging between pods, a living lightning rod. Each touch to an orb was a micro-discharge, overloading its circuits, sending it spiraling to the floor in a shower of sparks.
Heaven didn't follow his path. She went linear. A kinetic blast shot from her palm, a concussive wave that didn't spread. It focused into a tunnel of force, punching a straight line through the incoming orbs, pulverizing them mid-air into metallic dust that rained down on the silent pods.
For a few seconds, it was a violent, beautiful coordination. A dance they hadn't performed in years, the steps returning with muscle-deep memory.
Then the lights changed. The soft white luminescence flickered, strobing into a urgent, pulsating amber. An alarm didn't sound so much as the hum shifted, deepening into a resonant, teeth-juddering klaxon that felt lodged in their skulls.
From the seamless walls, panels slid open. Figures emerged. They moved with a familiar, jerky precision. Grey uniforms. Blank faces. But these weren't like the ones on the rooftop. Their eyes were vacant, shining with the same pale green glow as the nutrient fluid. Nen signatures—patchwork, discordant, and powerful—flickered around them like faulty neon.
"More security?" Heaven growled, falling back-to-back with Killua as six of them formed a loose circle.
"Not security," Killua said, his voice cold. He recognized the woman with the heat-haze hands from the rooftop. The man who exhaled corrosive mist. Their wounds were gone. Their eyes were not their own. "Recycling."
The one with the heat-haze hands lunged, her movement a direct, unthinking sprint. Killua met her, catching her wrist, the sizzle of her stolen ability burning against his reinforced Nen. He flipped her, driving her head into the unyielding floor. There was a sickening crack. She didn't cry out. She just twitched, then started to push herself back up, her neck at an impossible angle.
"Jesus," Heaven whispered.
A whip of solidified shadow shot from another grey suit. Killua severed it with a crackle of electricity, but the tendril recoiled and reformed instantly. A different suit inhaled, his chest swelling, and unleashed a gale-force wind that tore between the pods, making them sway on their stands.
They were being attacked by a battery of abilities, but the users were hollow. Pupils. It was horrifying, and it was inefficient. The attacks were powerful but slow, predictable.
"Don't kill them!" Heaven shouted, deflecting a spray of acid with a kinetic shield that splattered the fluid harmlessly across the floor. "They're still in there somewhere!"
"And that helps us how?" Killua ducked a spear of crystalline rock, slicing its base with a charged hand. The construct shattered.
Heaven didn't answer with words. She dodged a lunging attack, placed her palm on the assailant's chest, and pulsed. Not a destructive blast. A targeted, high-frequency vibration. The grey suit's eyes rolled back, his stolen Nen sputtered, and he collapsed, unconscious but breathing. A temporary fix.
Killua saw it. The vulnerability. These were remote-controlled dolls, their connection dependent on focus. He changed tactics. Instead of meeting force with force, he became interference. He darted between them, not attacking their bodies, but lashing their auras with disruptive, chaotic bursts of his own electricity. It was like throwing sand into a complex machine.
One by one, their movements became more uncoordinated. The heat-haze woman stumbled, her hands smoking erratically. The shadow-wielder’s constructs melted into formless blobs.
Heaven took advantage of the confusion. She moved like a ghost, a precise tap here, a stunning pulse there. They worked in a desperate, wordless tandem, disabling the husks without destroying them. It was harder, messier, and it took everything they had.
The last suit, the one who could exhale acid, fell to his knees, choking on his own dormant power. The pulsating amber lights continued to flash, but the immediate threat was neutralized. For now.
They stood panting in the center of the circle of slumped bodies. The sterile air now smelled of ozone, burnt plastic, and sweat.
"He's learning from us," Killua said, looking down at the twitching forms. "Every move we make. He's adapting the archive."
"Then we stop letting him watch," Heaven replied. She turned toward the concentrated pulse of light at the room's core. "We find the brain. And we give it a migraine it won't forget."
They started running. The pods blurred past, a river of stolen lives. The central light grew, resolving into a massive, spherical chamber walled in opaque, milky glass. Inside, they could see the silhouettes of thicker, more complex machinery, and a dense, tangled knot of light where all the siphoned aura-lines converged.
There was an entrance. A circular iris door, currently sealed.
Standing before it, alone, was Reed. He had not a hair out of place. In his hand was not a weapon, but a transparent data-slate. He was studying it as they skidded to a halt before him.
"Fascinating," Reed said, not looking up. "Your combined tactical efficiency against repurposed assets has improved by eighteen percent since the rooftop engagement. The feedback anomaly appears to have catalyzed a temporary synchronous resonance."
"Open the door, Reed," Killua said, electricity wreathing his forearm.
Reed finally looked up. His empty eyes moved from Killua to Heaven and back. "Specimen K-23. Specimen C-17. Your integration would significantly enhance the Anthology's predictive combat modelling." He tilted his head. "Voluntary compliance would, of course, be preferable. For the quality of the data."
Heaven’s laugh was a short, sharp crack. "You want us to just walk into a pod? After showing us this?"
"Your emotional resistance is anticipated. And valuable." Reed tapped his slate. The iris door behind him began to spiral open with a soft, hydraulic sigh. "The process is not without discomfort. But the reward is permanence. Your abilities, perfected. Your legacies, eternal. No more running, Zoldyck. No more betrayal, Celeste."
Beyond him, inside the chamber, they could see the source of the pulsing light. It wasn't a machine. Not exactly.
It was a pod, larger than the others, suspended in the center of the room. And inside, connected to a web of wires and tubes so dense it looked like a mechanical cocoon, was a man. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling. His aura—a horrific, churning amalgamation of every stolen color—blazed around him, feeding the entire system.
"It has a face," Heaven whispered, the blood draining from her own.
Reed smiled. It was a small, technical movement of his lips. "Meet Subject Alpha. The first iteration. My predecessor. He volunteered, of course. To become the keystone of a perfect, unified understanding." He stepped aside, gesturing toward the open door and the thrashing, brilliant light within. "Would you like to meet him?"