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There is a meteor. It's speeding through the black vacuum of space faster than anyone can calculate. You don't know where it's going, but you jump on anyway.
Since its creation many centuries ago, Dante's Inferno has been gradually adopted into most societies' image of what hell looks like. Within each hell, the epic describes with delightfully gory detail a whole slew of discomforts that exist to torment the poor souls who have fallen to sin. Though the punishments differ between each one, their themes are fairly consistent: filth, gore, extreme temperatures, and an endless cycle of eating or being eaten.
In the place where more than eight million people call home, there are all of the above and more.
Hot, dusty wind sweeps across the landscape, bringing with it grit and grime, and the stench of death and decay. The sun beats mercilessly down from the pale sky from high above, cracking the earth and sucking out any moisture from the very atmosphere. It scorches the vast mountains of metal junk to unbearable temperatures, where a careless brush against the metal will burn the skin right off of flesh. The odors of rot and decomposition constantly hover in the air like a heavy fog and it invades every one of your senses. In the distance, someone screams; a shrill, death rattling cry that is cut off violently.
Meteor City is the garbage dump of the world, where the outcasts of society, the unwanted, malformed, and the lowest of the low make their homes. People are allowed to leave anything there, from broken refrigerators to nuclear waste to human beings, alive or dead.
The eight million citizens of Meteor City are a diverse, but proud people. They believe in being the scum of the earth, and take immense pride in being the scum of the earth.
Because while the residents of Meteor City may mob, rob and kill each other on a regular basis, there's nothing that united them more than outsiders. It's as clear cut as "us" and "them". The general philosophy every citizen has is that the whole world is the enemy and Meteor City is always at war with the enemy. What the residents do to each other are easily dismissed domestic disputes compared to what the outsiders can do to them.
Due to this way of thinking, and other additional elements, Meteor City has eventually developed a loosely structured internal market system. The basic idea is that you can trade whatever you have with the City's established merchants (basically whoever who isn't too busy dying of starvation to collect a surplus of things not necessarily for eating) and get something of negotiated value in return.
Among the eight to ten million inhabitants of Meteor City, perhaps three hundred are actually any genuine 'merchants'. It's a matter of supply, after all every person is in competition with the other to get things of possible value, no matter how large the trash piles are and how many things they hold. Many of those things are either unusable or not physically possible for the human body to digest.
And of course, the most obvious reason: being a merchant requires power, because everyone wants to steal your stuff.
Thus, it just so happens that most merchants in Meteor City are users of Nen, whether they're aware of it or not.
Blue is one of these merchants. Her main shop site is located somewhere around the area between the fifth and sixth districts, which are some of the milder parts of Meteor City, where there are only petty thieves, criminals who have been exiled from their country and basically everywhere else, and other minor individuals.
(Around District Eleven is where things start to get a little crazy, and District Eighteen is where you start to see the mutated animals and other radioactive organisms. Twenty is where the cannibals live, Twenty-Five is a nuclear waste deposit, and everyone knows to stay away from District Thirty-Two.)
As both a merchant and a born Meteor City citizen, Blue has some general rules. One, no pity. And two, no questions. Rules three to five have been lost somewhere along the way, and are nowhere to be found.
In a society where death, starvation, and sickness run rampant, no one can afford to take care of anyone apart from themselves. If one needs someone to provide for them, they are completely and utterly screwed. In fact, they might as well die immediately rather than later, by an inevitably slow and grueling death.
Sometimes the thing Blue sells to someone comes back to her by way of a different person who wants to sell it to her. She doesn't ask questions. This happens more than one would think. Sometimes it happens in the same day.
Blue is somewhat notorious in the areas she usually traverses. Her shop, when it is set up, is a simple tent-pavilion structure, just enough for four people to stand comfortably in. It's a rare sight, being one of the City's only actually structurally sound constructions. Everyone knows, that when they see a dirty canvas tent with faded smears of blue paint across the top, it's Blue's Shop.
Inside, it's dark and muggy and terribly hot, but the promise of Blue's unusually high quality items for sale is more than enough incentive for people to bear with the discomforts. The matter of Blue's merchandise makes her especially popular among the City's populace, being both of considerable quality and of unusual variety, including not only food, clothes, and weapons, but also working radios, car batteries, soap, books, and other miscellaneous products.
In other places you'd normally think that Blue would get more trouble with burglaries and such. After all, she is a lone woman with little to no acquaintances and a large collection of valuables to her name.
But Meteor City is a society where the only thing that matters is power. Without power, people die, and when you're dead, nothing about you matters anymore. Death is the thing that erases everything about a person when they die, also known, as Blue likes to call it, as the great equalizer.
Ironically, this awareness makes Meteor City one of the best countries in terms of racial, gender and sexual equality in the world. No one cares if you're a woman or gay or transexual or, really, what color your skin is, as long as you're powerful enough to cheat Death.
And then there's also Blue's power, a unique display where she summons man-eating fish that swim through the air in her tent, a strong enough deterrent against anyone foolish enough to get the idea of stealing from her. Amongst her customers, it's agreed that the most frightening aspect about it is that the victim doesn't feel anything, and subsequently doesn't realize what's happening to them, right up until they've already been devoured whole.
The general consensus, they all say, is that you just don't screw with Blue.
One day, Blue meets the first person in a long while who tries to steal from her.
It's a young boy who looks to be perhaps seven years old (though it could be anywhere from six to fourteen, Blue has such trouble with guessing ages). He looks like any other slum rat kid running around in Meteor City; dirty, covered in grime, greasy hair and hungry eyes that are too big for their face, a still developing bone structure with too-thin limbs and joints jutting out sharply against ill-fitting clothes.
As a rule of circumstances, children don't really exist in Meteor City. Childhood is something of a fantasy here, reserved only for places where people have the luxury of not having to worry about someone slitting your throat in your sleep for the shoes on your feet, or whether the radioactive mushroom will kill you if you eat it, because it's the only thing you have to eat. In the junkyard lands, there are solely people who are bigger and more developed, and others who are smaller and easier to kill.
He slips into her tent with the air of a person with a mission and his eyes brighten when they land on the stacks of books to the side. Blue watches him eye them hungrily, and clears her throat.
"I don't do business for window shoppers here," she tells him lightly, even as she runs her knuckles over the bone ridge of her fish with a casual sort of warning edge.
It seems to take a lot to tear his eyes away from the books and look at the woman with sharp eyes sitting at the back of the tent. The boy watches the strange spindly creatures swimming lazily around her, takes stock of the multiple rows of tiny razor-edge teeth in their maws, and smiles blandly at Blue.
"It was never my intention," he says, and leaves as quickly as he arrived.
Two days after, in the middle of the night, Blue catches him trying to steal her books, just as she suspected. What she didn't anticipate though, was the boy figuring out the one weakness to her indoor fish.
As she watches him dash away through the entrance of her tent, the flaps pinned open with crude nails jabbed through the canvas, she finds herself mildly impressed. Boy has a sharp mind.
Too bad she doesn't need to rely on her fish to solve her problems, she muses to herself, even as she plows him to the ground five seconds later.
The boy retaliates with a wildly thrown punch that catches her on the shoulder, and she takes a brief moment to admire the surprising amount of force packed behind the blow. Gifted with both brain and brawn, she sees.
"Those who know me well know better than to underestimate my capacities, lad," she says as she holds him by the neck on the ground like some sort of wayward kitten.
The boy snarls and thrashes around on his back for a few more seconds before he goes silent and limp beneath her hand. "Gonna kill me now?" He asks quietly, voice resigned. (But his grey gaze is burning, boiling with an indignant sort of fury. He's not done yet, is what his expression says, he still has so many more things to do.)
One of his hands comes up, almost as if unbidden, and wraps around the arm that's holding him down. For someone so young, it's a grip like steel and Blue idly speculates that if the boy is able to put just a little more pressure into it, her wrist will snap. She stares into his eyes, rich grey eyes that have a scorching fire raging in them, filled to the brim with the instincts of a predator with nothing left holding it back and a keen intelligence that can only come from inborn genius. I dare you, they say, I can take whatever you can throw at me, and Blue is tempted to take the challenge.
But killing someone that strong will be a shame. A massive waste of potential, she thinks, and tells him so.
"Come back when you have something of value," she adds, letting go of him and standing up. The nearly stolen books are back in her hands. "And we'll do proper business together."
He's there the following day. Blue trades him three novels for a decent pair of boots and a fairly well-maintained set of throwing knives. One of them has a little smidgen of bright red blood, still fresh and wet, but he quickly wipes it away with a casual gesture. She ignores it.
"Don't disappoint me," she tells him instead, and he smiles at her like it's a secret only they share.
There's a meteor. It's on fire. It's punching through the layers of Earth's atmosphere at 60 kilometers per second. Now you know where it's going. You can't save yourself. All you can do is hold on, and feel the wind card its fingers lovingly through your hair and peel the skin away from your bones.
He keeps coming back. Blue keeps selling her books. Eventually she learns that the boy's name is Kuroro, and that he's around eight years old, though ages and birthdays with Meteor City residents are always a bit finicky. It puts her about fifteen years older than him.
One day he asks her how come she has so many books included in her wares. Books, after all, are a rare sight in the City. They're kind of useless, fragile, and not very good for eating. Most people aren't even literate.
She tells him that she binds and repairs the books herself.
"Knowledge," she says, "comes in many forms. But the most convenient way to record and keep knowledge is in books, and thus it spreads easily through the masses as the book is read."
All books, even those that are just fairytales, are a vital part of humanity, Blue believes. It is the creativity and the ability to seek out more knowledge that separates humans from beasts. Most people in Meteor City aren't able to appreciate that, so that's why the line between beasts and men is the most smudged in this junkyard land.
The look she receives from the boy is something between surprise and awe, like he's finally found someone he can respect, that truly understands.
"What makes you so interested in books?" Blue asks him, curious.
He tells her that he's going to get out of Meteor City someday, and not just as another beggar or prostitute that people who leave the City normally become in the outside world. He's going to be something more, something bigger and grander; he's done with this life as just another slum rat, he's sick and tired of it when he knows he has both the resolve and the capability to be something so much better.
Blue has heard the same itinerary from many, many people before, who've all failed because they hadn't realized what it all really meant. But when Kuroro gets that ravenous, manic look on his face and his eyes shine bright with that alien intelligence she'd glimpsed in him when she first saw him, she thinks that he looks like the one who'll be the first to actually do it.
"Knowledge is a powerful weapon if you know how to use it," Kuroro says. "Anyone can fire a gun and swing a knife, but knowledge doesn't run out of bullets and it doesn't have a blade to dull. In my opinion, it is a much more potent, more useful thing to have."
"Only in the right hands," Blue reminds him. "You can't have too much of something and not enough of another."
He agrees. "Of course."
Blue's shop has become a sort of common place for Kuroro to read his books in. By this time he's bought a decent stack of his own from Blue's collection. On a particularly slow and humid day, Blue is watching Kuroro leaf through another thick tome, poring over each word on each page like it's something to savor, to keep and treasure, when she's suddenly struck with the question of how Kuroro knows how to read.
"I tortured it out of a social worker from the outside," is his answer when she asks.
Nodding, Blue sits back, and has no sympathy for the social worker. Meteor City occasionally gets them; people from the big cities who have fantasies of coming into Meteor City and putting paved roads and installing a plumbing system into the ground, of saving the poor people who live there from their poverty.
But the residents of Meteor City are a proud people, and doing that to their city will take everything about their culture away from them, so everyone generally hates those people. It's usually when those social workers actually arrive at Meteor City and see it for themselves in all its vast, smelly, horrible glory that they get squeamish when they realize what they want to do actually entails. And then they back away slowly, like frightened pups who've poked their noses into something too unpleasant and too big for their dainty pampered paws to handle.
"Nice," is all she says.
Blue has always been considered a lone wolf type of figure by the people who know her, so they're reasonably surprised when her customers start seeing a young slum boy hanging about her shop tent. Then, as days turn to weeks, then months, they start calling him 'Blue's brat', and he's granted local immunity by association. No one wants to mess with someone who seems to be under Blue's protection.
The merchant herself is surprised when she hears them calling Kuroro hers. Although it had never been Blue's intention, she finds nothing wrong with the arrangement, and neither does Kuroro. The two have found kindred spirits within each other, and if Blue starts keeping a closer eye on Kuroro than before, or occasionally leaving out scraps of food or articles of clothing for him to find, neither of them mention it.
One day Blue is in the middle of binding a book when Kuroro comes into her shop. She spares a glance at the fresh purple splotches on his thin legs and the cut over his eye, half hidden by messy bangs, and continues on with her task.
Ever the curious one, Kuroro asks what book is it that she's working on right now.
"The book of Revelations," she says.
"Revelations?"
And she tells him about the religions of the outside, about God, gods, and upper beings, and what people can and have done in the name of their religion. She tells him that Revelations is the last part of a book called the Holy Bible, which details the birth, life, and death of a man called Jesus, who brought miracles and inspired faith in the land with his twelve disciples, who was loved by some and hated by others and eventually died in a very painful way by the hands of the very people he had done good to.
"What a foolish man," comments Kuroro, who can't understand the ideals of a man who lived his entire life for the sake of others, having been born in a society where people murdered others just to have the clothes on their back.
"The book of Revelations describes the end of the world," says Blue, shrugging, who can't understand it either.
But Kuroro seems especially fascinated by the concept of the twelve disciples, and Blue decides to leave him to his own thoughts.
As the years pass by, Blue keeps a careful watch on Kuroro, and doesn't find herself disappointed. She watches him burn through her entire collection of books and continue on to devour any and all knowledge he can find, always hungering for more. His brilliant mind absorbs all of it like an infinite sponge until it has surpassed anything she's ever seen; until sometimes it's like he's thinking on an entirely different level, in a whole new world.
She watches Kuroro grow into his natural charm, and learn how to use his overwhelming charisma to take people much bigger and more stronger than him and twist them around his fingers as naturally as a fish swims in water.
In a few short years, the skinny boy with nothing but a genius intelligence and a resolve to use it has grown into a beautiful, deadly man who can make anyone do anything for him with just a few simple words, and feel happy doing it.
And then Kuroro decides to make himself his very own rendition of the Holy Bible's twelve disciples, and he starts collecting people like pretty marbles, starting with a tiny dark-haired boy who speaks like he's from another land and hasn't gotten used to speaking another country's language just yet, with a fascination with pain and a penchant for inflicting it on others.
Then it's two girls in the middle of a bloody battlefield; one with an eerily accurate perception of a person's thoughts and a perfect aim, another who can sew a person back together without a single drop of blood spilling. A giant, hulking boy joins them not long after, built like a mountain and bearing stitch scars in strange places. And another pair, this time two boys who are already best friends, who look like exact opposites of each other but who operate nearly like they've joined minds, together unstoppable in battle.
One day, Kuroro comes to Blue's shop and asks her to join his bandit group. The Genei Ryodan, he calls it. A twelve-legged spider is his chosen symbol.
"I don't have twelve legs yet," he tells her. "But I will, and you will be one of them."
A head pokes curiously into the tent, the small girl with an odd hue of hair, likely a more mild side effect from the high radiation levels of the land, whose blue eyes widen when she sees Blue. She goes away just as quickly, pulled away by the tiny boy with sharp eyes.
Kuroro says that he's leaving soon, and that the only person left in Meteor City who he wants to bring with him is Blue. The woman who is so powerful that even other merchants with bigger friends stay clear of her; who provided him the books he'd been searching for years and gave him the inspiration to create the Ryodan, who has become something of a mentor and a very dear friend to him over the past few years.
Blue, having expected this ever since Kuroro first told her his idea, has been ready to leave her role as a merchant since a long time ago. "You want an old girl like me in your club, lad?" she says, and laughs.
She becomes member number Eight.
There's a meteor. It's bleeding red with heat. The ground is rushing closer and closer to you faster than you can imagine. You're laughing. There's the taste of death under your tongue and sweet exhilaration upon your lips. You close your eyes, and brace for impact.
The Genei Ryodan keeps collecting people, growing in size and power until they're just a couple short of Kuroro's desired thirteen.
The first to join outside of Meteor City is another boy that they meet by trying to steal from him, this one blond with large hands that are perfect for shattering bones and crushing lives, who is just as brash as he is swift and strong. And then another blond boy, with nimble fingers and a mind for computer programs and the clockworks of the human will, who swiftly makes friends with Pakunoda.
A girl joins them on the road, alone and empty-headed and covered in blood, whom Kuroro gently takes the knife from her white-knuckled grip and tells her that they can be her family, and that they won't be as easy to kill as her old one.
Now Blue sees how Kuroro has been able to keep nine hyperactive, very volatile and very powerful individuals under reasonable control. She watches him approach the ones that catch his eye, always alone, and add to the ranks one by one, watches people gravitate towards Kuroro like he's a magnet, born to lead and rule over people.
When Kuroro speaks, people listen. There's something in Kuroro that inspires blind faith and absolute loyalty in everyone he meets, be it out of devotion or obsession.
And as Blue looks at these young men and women, even the oldest of them several years younger than her, each and every one of them willing to die for Kuroro and willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, she thinks that maybe, she's been put under his spell as well.
The Genei Ryodan, with its eleven members, makes its grand entrance into the world by raiding five major banks spread over three cities at the same time.
Kuroro wants avoid to losing momentum, so after that, they rob a museum completely empty. A week later, another incident, this one a billionaire's precious stones collection mysteriously disappearing, is put on the news.
The Genei Ryodan, or which others call the Phantom Troupe, has an incredibly apt name, they all agree. In every one of their operations, there are no witnesses, no cameras that catch them on tape, and only empty vaults and a lot of dead people. What traces of DNA that the investigators have been able to find only tell them that it's the same eleven people doing all these things. Just like phantoms, there are no records, paper trails, or even voice recognition. The Genei Ryodan leaves no eye witnesses, because they're all dead.
Somewhere along the way, they get another addition to their numbers, this one a copier who had grown tired of fakes, who isn't too strong but has a unique ability, and who Kuroro had coaxed into his collection just by a few simple words, "How would you like to hold the real thing?"
Next is a man who has a strange fascination with the intricacies and fallibilities of the human body, a penchant for manipulating them, and a large eye collection. None of the other members, except apparently Kuroro, likes him.
"Creepy," Blue once said to Kuroro. "He's loyal to no one but himself."
"Easier to control then," Kuroro had answered. "Find a man's goal and you have his heart in your palm."
With the addition of Omokage, the Spider finally has all of its twelve legs.
And then the Zoldyck family is sent after Kuroro's head.
"The Kurta Clan hired them," Shalnark tells them, after some background investigation. "They are afraid that we'll go after their eyes."
But the Zoldycks are professionals, and they've sent their best agent. Silva Zoldyck soon comes knocking on their doorstep and it's timed exactly right when the rest of the Ryodan are out crashing a millionaire's gala. Kortopi is quickly taken out of commission. Kuroro and Blue are left to face him down, and it quickly becomes a war zone.
Silva Zoldyck in his prime is a one man battalion, and with his transmutation ability to turn anything he touches into liquid, he's nearly enough of an opponent for the both of them. Blue and Kuroro both know though, that if they really wanted to, they could easily kill the assassin together. Blue has taught Kuroro well.
But Kuroro's fascinated, something has caught his eye yet again and through the scrapes, cuts, and broken bones they've already gathered, he tells Blue that he wants that very curious skill that Silva Zoldyck has. Blue simply nods, and trusts that Kuroro knows what he's doing.
Their plan is on the verge of success when everything goes wrong, it's a freak accident and Kuroro slips on a patch of blood on a pane of broken glass.
Blue snarls like a lioness protecting her kin and in a fit of inhuman speed, she grabs Kuroro savagely by the collar and throws him across the battlefield, just as Silva's hand liquifies a hole through her stomach. In the next second Silva finds himself bereft of his ability and Kuroro has it now.
But it doesn't matter anymore, none of that matters now, because Kuroro's watching Blue fall to the ground with her abdomen mostly gone, completely turned to a bloody red water that pools around her and soaks into her clothes. Kuroro watches her and he knows the exact moment Blue hits the ground, recognizes the wound as one that is absolutely fatal.
Then Kuroro turns on Silva Zoldyck with a new goal in mind. Something has been taken from him, and whether it's in Meteor City or as a part of the Genei Ryodan, Blue has taught him that the only thing he can't ever steal back is a person's life once it's gone. And now Blue is gone.
(That mission is the first that Silva fails. When he returns to the Zoldyck mansion, bloody, tired, and without his hatsu ability, the first thing he tells his wife and children is to stay away from the Genei Ryodan.)
When everything is done and Silva Zoldyck is gone, regrettably escaped, Kuroro stands still amongst the destruction that surrounds him, everything in the vicinity flattened to the ground during the battle. Kuroro, he hears by a whisper carried on the wind, lad, come here.
Blue, he discovers as he drops to his knees next to her, is amazingly still alive, hanging on to dear life by a thinning thread. She's using her Nen, he realizes on closer inspection and with no little astonishment, she's using it to block her leaking blood vessels, to hold everything inside.
I am here Blue, he says, because he sees from the way her eyes are flickering in and out of focus, normally so sharp like an eagle's, that she's lost her vision.
Lad, bring me inside, she says to him.
Inside? Kuroro asks. You'll die the moment I move you.
I won't. A hand comes up to grip his arm, just as strong as he's always remembered it being, hard enough that he feels her callouses press into his flesh, the ones she's gotten from binding together a thousand books in her lifetime. And if my insides fall out, just shove them back in.
Blue doesn't make a sound when Kuroro picks her up and carries her inside an abandoned building, one of the few still standing. It's a long moment of silence, during which Kuroro fears that she's died in the process of moving her, before he hears her speak again.
The door. Close it.
As soon as the doors shut, Blue's indoor fish materialize, all seven of them gliding gracefully and silently through the air, their bone exoskeletons glowing softly in the dim light. When Kuroro had seen them for the first time, back in Blue's dark and humid shop, he'd thought that it had been the most beautiful thing in the world. He still believes that.
Now, lad, ask me a question, whispers Blue, strength slowly slipping away as the the seconds pass.
Kuroro realizes what she's doing, what she wants, and doesn't spare another second. He refuses to let Blue's last living moments go to waste.
Emission? he asks. Or manipulation?
Blue smiles. Her eyes are closed now, and barely her lips move. Both, she says.
Even as he lifts Blue's palm up to touch the handprint on the cover of the Bandit's Secret, Kuroro's watching her closer than ever, watching and waiting for the inevitable. He sees the moment Blue breathes her last, and counts the seconds down to when her heart stops beating.
Her page appears in his book, and for a second Kuroro holds his breath, fearing that it will disappear at any moment.
But it stays. It stays and that means Blue has somehow managed to do the impossible even halfway through death's door. The remnants of Blue's Nen, driven by the sheer strength of her will, remains left behind in this world, simply so that Kuroro would have access to her ability.
It's extremely fitting, Kuroro thinks, Blue has never let herself be confined to the limits of human power. Even in death.
The Ryodan, when they return, come back to the sight of a broken, obliterated landscape, pools of mysterious liquid everywhere and craters in the ground, still smoking and dust still hanging in the air.
They find Kuroro sitting next to Blue's dead body, carefully laid out and limbs arranged neatly, though none of it distracts the viewer's eye from the massive chunk of body missing from her middle section.
"Silva Zoldyck visited," Kuroro tells them. There's something in his eyes, a brittle sharpness to his features that they've never seen before. A black inferno roars behind his empty expression, a thirst as deep and dark as the eternal abyss.
Machi takes one look at Blue and knows that even if she'd been present there was nothing she could've done with her threads, because there isn't anything left for her to sew together. The rest of them are completely silent, solemn in a way that shows their thoughts more than any words can. If only they had been there, they think, but they hadn't even known.
Feitan, Machi, Pakunoda, Ubogin, and everyone in the Ryodan who are from Meteor City know what they have to do. The people of Meteor City have a tradition. When a comrade has been wronged and killed, they arrange a funeral pyre lined with the corpses of all those who have wronged their dead comrade.
So when Kuroro tells his Spiders that the Genei Ryodan has a new mission now, most of them aren't even surprised.
They put Blue's body in a crudely made coffin, and then they set out, coffin and all, to serve sweet vengeance served the way only Meteor City residents knew how: over-the top, bloody and gory.
Later, deep in the forests of the Lukso province, in the aftermath of a horribly long, bloody fight, the Ryodan are ripping the last of the eyes out from the skulls of the massacred Kurta clan.
The scarlet hue is said to be the most beautiful sight ever to be recorded in history, but Kuroro looks at them and thinks that he's seen seven other things more beautiful.
They pile up the corpses as high as the old trees around them, Blue's coffin placed carefully on top.
Kuroro takes the jars upon jars of brilliant scarlet eyes, the second most beautiful thing in the world, offers every one of them up to Blue, and sets it all on fire.
There's a meteor. Boom.