Chapter 9: The Arms Dealer's Blessing
The door screeched shut behind them, plunging them into a different kind of dark. The air was warm, thick with the smells of machine oil, ozone, and something acrid like soldered metal. Instead of the expected cavernous decay, they stood in a narrow, reinforced corridor, its walls lined with humming conduit and bundles of fiber-optic cable. Strip lighting flickered overhead.
Mach was already ten paces ahead, not looking back. “Wipe your feet,” he repeated, gesturing vaguely at a grimy industrial mat. “I don’t need river silt in my gears.”
They followed. The corridor turned, then opened abruptly into the vast heart of the old treatment plant. Heaven stopped, taking it in. It wasn’t a workshop. It was a cathedral to improvised annihilation.
The central space rose several stories, dominated by silent, cathedral-sized filtration tanks now crusted with rust and graffiti. But between and around them, Mach had built a city of clutter and creation. Workbenches groaned under disassembled engines and exotic circuitry. Chains hung from gantries, suspending incomplete metal skeletons that might have been drones or manned suits. One entire wall was a patchwork of over a hundred security monitors, showing every angle of the perimeter and interior in grainy monochrome. The low, constant hum came from server racks and hydroponic grow lights illuminating rows of leafy plants that weren’t any vegetable she recognized.
“You grow your own,” Killua noted, his eyes cataloging exits, weapons, potential threats.
“Pharmaceuticals are a ripoff,” Mach grumbled, tossing his wrench onto a bench with a deafening clang. He turned, fixing them with his gunmetal eyes. He looked Heaven up and down, his gaze lingering on her bandaged hand. “Celeste. Heard you had potential. Then I heard you went soft. Which is it?”
“I’m here,” she said flatly.
“A compelling argument.” He snatched a rag and wiped grease from his hands. “So. You’re dead. The families think you snuffed each other in Reed’s little underground orgasm of science. And instead of running to some beach with new identities, you come to my house. You want to burn the Vault.” He said it not as a question, but as a clinical fact. “The Zoldyck Vault. Where Silva keeps his favorite toys and his worst secrets.”
“Yes,” Killua said.
“And the Celeste Archive. The black site,” Heaven added. “We burn the contract. Both copies.”
Mach stared. Then a sound like grinding gravel came from his chest. Laughter. “Oh, that’s rich. That’s the best joke I’ve heard since your father tried to stiff me, kid. It’s impossible.”
“You just said you heard we were dead,” Killua countered, moving to lean against a workbench. He picked up a strange, multi-barreled component, examined it, set it down. “That was impossible too.”
“Being dead is easy. The Vault has a seven-stage biometric lock sequenced to Silva and his eldest clown, Milluki. The final chamber is a void cube. No air. Gravity-field floor. Anything that trips the final seal gets compressed into a neat, one-inch cube of junk. The security feed isn’t even digital. It’s recorded on a closed-loop analog system that feeds into Silva’s private study. You can’t hack a film reel.” He ticked the points off on gnarled fingers. “The Archive is worse. It’s a ghost drive. It exists only when three living members of the Celeste inner council trigger a simultaneous psychic Nen imprint. You can’t find the server because it doesn’t exist until they summon it. It’s the best piece of conceptual Nen architecture I’ve ever seen, and I hate admitting anything those pricks do is good.”
Heaven felt a cold drip of despair. She’d known it was hard. She hadn’t known it was mythic.
Killua, however, just looked thoughtful. “You’ve studied them.”
“Of course I’ve studied them! They’re my life’s work! Silva is a pompous, preening gargoyle who thinks his family’s violence is an art form. It’s plumbing. Efficient, nasty plumbing. I’ve spent twenty years designing better pipes.” He waved a hand around the chamber. “Every toy here is a love letter to disproving Zoldyck superiority.”
“So give us the love letter,” Killua said quietly.
Mach studied him. The amusement faded, replaced by a sharp, calculating intensity. “Why? Why burn a piece of paper? It’s symbolic. Won’t change anything. The hatred’s in the blood now, not the ink.”
Heaven spoke before Killua could. “Because the paper is the proof. It’s the recipe. It says the blood feud was never real. It was a corporate merger. We end the proof, we end the… the authority of it. We tell them their war is a fraud. That we know.”
“And then they’ll just kill you harder.”
“Probably,” Killua shrugged. “But they’ll have to do it without their favorite rulebook. That’s the point. It’s not about winning. It’s about spoiling the game. Pissing in the well.”
A slow, unpleasant smile spread across Mach’s face. It was all teeth and malice. “Now that I understand.” He turned and strode towards the back of the space, past a hanging curtain of chains. “Follow me. And don’t touch anything. Most of this stuff is… unstable.”
He led them into a smaller, lower-ceilinged chamber. The air here was cooler, drier. The walls were lined not with tools, but with finished products. They were horrible in their elegant simplicity.
On one shelf rested a row of spheres the size of apples, their surfaces swirling with a liquid, mercury-like substance. “Volatility orbs,” Mach said, patting one like a pet. “Breach a containment field, the liquid inside experiences a localized time-dilation collapse. Makes a hole in anything. Also makes a very expensive noise.”
He moved on. A rack held what looked like suits of slick, black body armor. “Thermoptic weave. Bends light, masks infrared signature. Doesn’t stop a bullet, but makes you a ghost to scanners and eyes. Limited charge.”
He stopped before a large, sealed case. He pressed his thumb to a lock. It hissed open, revealing a canister about the size of a fire extinguisher. It was painted a dull, non-reflective black. He stroked it with a disturbing tenderness.
“And this,” he whispered. “This is my masterpiece. I call it ‘Heartstopper.’ It’s not explosive. It’s a Nen-conductive corrosive aerosol. You release it in an enclosed space. It seeks the most potent, active Nen source and… adheres. Then it converts the target’s own aura into a cascading decay agent. It eats Nen, then flesh, then structure. Silently. For a Vault that uses Nen-based locks and security? It’s a key that turns the lock into soup.”
Heaven stared at the canister. It looked inert. It looked evil.
“You want to burn the Vault?” Mach rasped, turning to them. His eyes were alight with a fanatical glee. “I’ll give you the fire. The Celeste Archive… that’s trickier. You can’t burn a ghost. You have to force it to materialize. For that, you’d need leverage. Something the inner council values more than their secrecy.” He looked between them. “Got any cousins you’re willing to kidnap?”
“We’re not kidnapping anyone,” Killua said, his voice final.
“Then you’ll fail at half your mission.”
“We’ll adapt.”
Mach snorted. “Spoken like a true Zoldyck. All momentum, no plan.” He closed the case with the Heartstopper and dragged it off the shelf. He then moved swiftly, gathering items: two of the thermoptic suits, a bandolier of the volatility orbs, a small, brutal-looking pistol with no visible ammunition chamber. He piled it all on a central table.
“This is the starter pack. The suit will get you past external sensors. The orbs will get you through internal doors if you’re clever. The gun fires crystalline shards coated in a neural inhibitor. It’ll drop anything organic for about ten minutes. Gives you a window.” He tapped the Heartstopper case. “This is for the main chamber. It’ll take about thirty seconds to prime. You’ll need to be close to the target lock. It’ll be messy.”
“What’s the price?” Killua asked. His posture was relaxed, but Heaven could see the readiness in him. The calculation.
Mach’s grin returned. “The price is the show. I don’t want money. I want the security footage. The analog feed from the Vault’s inner chamber. You get the film canister for me. I want to watch Silva’s face when he sees what you did. I want to see the moment he understands it was my fire that burned his legacy.” The hatred in his voice was pure, refined, a decades-old vintage. “That’s the deal. You bring me the tape. You get to keep whatever you scrape out of the melt. And you get the satisfaction of knowing you drove a splinter right into the old bastard’s heart.”
Killua looked at Heaven. A silent question passed between them. This wasn’t just gear. It was a pact with a very particular devil. It tied their success to Mach’s vendetta. It made him a participant.
She gave a single, slight nod. The anger in her, cold and solid, agreed. Let Silva hurt. Let him feel the bite of a tool he’d discarded.
“Deal,” Killua said.
she loved so deeply about him
Mach nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin, and began loading the gear into two heavy duffels. The zippers sounded like bones cracking in the quiet. He worked with an efficiency that spoke of military training, or maybe just a lifetime of preparing for escapes that never came.
He paused, a volatility orb hovering over the bag’s mouth. He looked between them, his gaze lingering on the space between their bodies, on the careful, conscious distance they maintained. He set the orb down with a soft click.
“You know,” Mach said, his voice losing its transactional edge, dipping into something rougher and more thoughtful. “There’s another way to get back at your families. A meaner one. Doesn’t require any of my toys.”
Killua’s eyes narrowed. “We’re listening.”
“You could just live.” Mach let the word hang in the oily air. “I mean really live. Get a mortgage. Have screaming fights about taking out the trash. Have a kid. Get a dog. Die old and boring and surrounded by people who have no idea what the word ‘Zoldyck’ or ‘Celeste’ even means.” A bitter smile touched his lips. “Nothing would piss them off more. Their perfect weapons, dulled into nothing. Their legacy, ended not with a bang, but a whimper from a grandkid who wants a pony.”
Heaven felt the suggestion like a physical blow, absurd and terrifying. The image was so alien it was laughable. It was also, she realized with a cold knot in her stomach, completely impossible for either of them. The silence stretched, filled only by the hum of the servers.
“But you won’t,” Mach sighed, reading their faces. “Can’t. The programming’s too deep. Which brings me to my real question.” He leaned back against the case containing Heartstopper, crossing his arms. “Why do you think they were so bent on you being rivals? Specifically you two. Not just the families. You.”
Killua shifted his weight. “To make us stronger. Competition breeds excellence. It’s the family way.”
“Is it?” Mach fired back. “Or does it just breed obsession? You ever think maybe they weren’t trying to make you the best assassins? Maybe they were trying to make you the most predictable ones.”
Heaven’s head came up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it. From the night you were born, your paths were set. You were each other’s shadow, your counterpart. Your entire worldviews, your training, your metrics for success—all tied to outperforming the other. Every move you made was a reaction to a ghost.” He pointed a greasy finger at Killua. “You left the family, but you’re still defined by them. By her. By beating them.” The finger swung to Heaven. “And you got left, and now your entire being is about proving you didn’t need him, about burning it all down. Their masterpiece wasn’t creating two perfect killers. It was creating two perfectly managed ones. You’re both still on their leashes, just straining in opposite directions.”
The words landed in the stillness, ugly and undeniable. Killua remembered the relentless comparisons, the dossiers on Heaven’s progress that would appear on his training desk. Heaven recalled the cold praise from her aunts when she finally outperformed “the Zoldyck boy’s” time on the infiltration course. Their rivalry hadn’t been an accident. It had been architecture.
“They made you focus on each other so you’d never turn that focus on them,” Mach finished, his voice a low rasp. “So you’d never ask the real questions. Like why two of the most powerful clans on the continent needed a blood feud to stay sharp. Like what they were so afraid of that they had to keep their best assets permanently looking sideways.”
Killua picked up one of the thermoptic suits, the material cool and slick like spider-silk. He rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, his mind working, reassembling memories with this new, corrosive lens. “You’re saying the contract, the feud… it was a containment strategy.”
“I’m saying a tree grown in a cage thinks the cage is the sky.” Mach pushed off from the case and shoved the duffels toward them across the concrete floor. They slid to a stop at their feet. “You want to truly screw them? Don’t just burn their paper. Break their narrative. Stop being the rival they made you to be.”
Heaven stared at the bag at her feet, then at Killua. The anger was still there, a cold, familiar stone in her gut. But underneath it, something else vibrated—a terrible, freeing kind of fury. It wasn’t just about revenge anymore. It was about sabotage from the inside out.
Killua met her eyes. The playful light was gone, replaced by a razor-sharp clarity. He hefted his duffel.
“First, we burn the cage,” he said. “Then we’ll see about the sky.”
He turned and walked toward the corridor without looking back. Heaven took a final breath of the tainted air, picked up her bag, and followed the pale glow of his hair into the dark.
Heaven took a final breath of the tainted air, picked up her bag, and followed the pale glow of his hair into the dark. The corridor seemed longer on the way out, the hum of the machinery a fading heartbeat. The heavy exterior door groaned open to a slash of predawn grey, the rain now a fine, chilling mist.
The river air hit her face, clean and sharp, washing away the smell of ozone and madness. They walked in silence along the slippery service road, the duffels heavy with impossible choices. The weight was uneven, awkward, a physical manifestation of Mach’s words still turning inside her.
After ten minutes, Killua stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp haloed in fog. “We need a hole. Somewhere the families won’t think to look for a week.”
“We have funds,” Heaven said, her voice sounding distant to her own ears. “The emergency drops are still viable. We can get a room.”
“A room,” he echoed, not a question. He was scanning the empty streets, his profile etched in the sickly light. He looked like what he was: a predator temporarily without a map. “Two beds, I assume.”
The comment was pragmatic, not pointed, but it still landed with a dull thud. “Obviously,” she said, too quickly.
He glanced at her, one eyebrow barely lifting, but said nothing more. He flagged down a rust-specked autonomous taxi that slid to the curb with a hydraulic sigh. They loaded the bags into the trunk, the volatile cargo making the mundane act feel like a bomb threat.
The taxi navigated toward the city’s indifferent core. They sat in the back, a full seat of cracked leather between them. The world outside blurred—neon signs for ramen shops and cybernetic clinics, early shift workers hunched against the damp. A normal world. Mach’s vision of a mortgage, a dog, a screaming fight over trash. The absurdity of it made her jaw ache.
She stole a look at Killua. He was staring out his window, but his reflection showed his eyes were open, unseeing. Processing. He was always processing. She wondered if Mach’s theory was cycling behind those ice-blue eyes, if he was re-evaluating every lesson, every mission, through this new lens of deliberate manipulation. The rivalry they’d lived, the benchmark of their entire youth, reduced to a management tactic. It was a special kind of violation.
The taxi deposited them at a modular capsule hotel in a district known for body modists and data traffickers. It was the kind of place that asked no questions because its facial-recognition software was permanently “under repair.” Killua handled the transaction with a burner chip at a kiosk, collecting two key cards.
Their unit was on the forty-second floor, a single long tube divided into two narrow sleep pods, a microscopic wet room, and a window that looked out onto the glowing canyon of adjacent towers. It smelled of ionized air and faint antiseptic.
Killua dropped his bag with a thump that seemed too loud. He immediately began a swift, silent patrol of the tiny space, checking air vents, the window seal, the paneling for any hint of surveillance. Old habits. Assassin’s feng shui.
Heaven just stood there, the strap of her duffel biting into her shoulder. She watched his efficient, lethal grace, the way his fingers trailed over surfaces feeling for vibrations. This was their life. Suspicion was their décor. The bags at their feet held tools to destroy their past, but the future was this: another sterile box, another temporary hold.
He finished his sweep and turned to her. “It’s clean. For now.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We should inventory what Mach gave us. Check the schematics he loaded onto the burner. Plan our approach vector to the estate.”
His voice was all mission, all forward momentum. It was how he’d always dealt with chaos—by structuring it into a series of solvable problems.
“We aren’t doing anything tonight,” Heaven heard herself say. The words came out flat, drained.
Killua paused, halfway to unzipping his bag.
She set her own bag down carefully, as if it were glass. “We need to rest. Actually rest. Recover. Heal.” She gestured vaguely at her bandaged hand, at the general weariness that felt bone-deep. “Plan. But not tonight.”
There was no fire in her declaration. It was just a fact, a quiet surrender to the sheer physical exhaustion that followed adrenaline’s cruel crash. But beneath the fatigue, Mach’s other words swirled, toxic and seductive. Have a kid.
The thought was so profoundly alien it felt like a synaptic misfire. A child. In their world? It had never been an option before, not a fleeting one. It was the antithesis of everything they were forged to be. A liability. A target. An impossibility.
Yet.
What if it was the ultimate sabotage? Not just burning a contract, but creating something entirely new, something their families couldn’t categorize, couldn’t weaponize? The thought was terrifying. It was also, for a blinding second, a form of hope so violent it felt like a blade twist.
She couldn’t look at him. She walked to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. The city’s grid stretched to the horizon, a circuit board of lives utterly disconnected from theirs.
“Kill,” she said, her breath fogging the pane.
“Yeah?”
“I need some space to think.”
The silence behind her was absolute. She could feel him still, a statue of controlled energy. He was interpreting the words, measuring the distance in them.
After a long moment, she heard the soft sound of a zipper. He was unpacking, methodically. “Okay,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. A simple acknowledgment. No pushback. No demand for explanation.
It was the only gift he could give her, and she felt a sudden, staggering gratitude for it. He understood that some battles weren’t fought in the open. Some required a retreat into private, silent trenches.
She listened to the rustle of fabric, the click of a weapon being checked and cleared. The sounds of their life. Then she heard him slide into one of the sleep pods, the curtain rasping shut.
Heaven remained at the window, watching the first specks of rain hit the glass and streak downward, cutting through the reflection of her own hollow eyes. The bags full of annihilation sat in the middle of the floor. And her mind, against all reason, drifted into a forbidden, fragile dream of a quiet room, of a different kind of weight in her arms, of a silence that wasn’t filled with planning or pain.