Morena's Contagion

Onior Longbao (Xi-Yu) and Brocco Li (Cha-R) are Nasubi's half-brothers; Morena Prudo (Heil-Ly) is his illegitimate daughter. Kakin scars its kings' bastards at birth and pays them to stay invisible — 'Second-track Fakers' propping up the monarchy from the gutter.

Morena's ability infects a community of 23 including herself: members gain power by killing — one level per civilian, ten per Nen user, fifty per prince. Level 20 grants an ability; level 100 lets a member seed their own community. Her stated aim is havoc, starting with the ship.

The Heil-Ly's Luini kills three more Cha-R guards to reach level 24, using a corpse to infiltrate and mark the family's hideout for his sealed-room transportation ability. His accomplice Cashew feeds Mizaistom a testimony of curated lies to gauge the Association's investigators.

To skeptical Kakin officers, Mizaistom argues the Tier 3 murders are succession-driven: powers bought with human sacrifice will keep demanding it, and the under-policed lower decks will burn first. He urges redeploying soldiers downward.

Ken'i and Vice Boss Tajao explain the custom: hits between families must be squared between bosses within 24 hours, with the boss off home turf when it happens. Over 300 workers are missing, Morena's Tier 1 room is empty, and no call has come — war with the Heil-Ly is now procedural fact.

On the phone, the Fourth Prince confirms his family's mafia arm has slipped his leash — Morena has been below decks since boarding — and tells the caller to do as they please. Behind him, Theta watches a second, self-made Specialist beast coalesce beside his Guardian Spirit Beast.

Onior directs Hinrigh to find Hisoka on Tier 3 while ceding Tier 4's search to the Spiders — keeping the Troupe where the family can watch it — and to kill Morena along the way.

Hinrigh's team corners Heil-Ly members registered as civilians — a legal trap, since mafia attacking civilians means catastrophe. When soldiers move them along, Hinrigh's Biohazard turns their gun barrels into snakes that shoot both men dead. The war stops pretending.

Three leveled Heil-Ly members ambush Hinrigh; his handcuff-pigeons shrug off bullets and shackle the weapon-limbed Padaille, whose own conjured axe is pushed into his skull. The survivors flee to ask Morena for instructions.

For fifty million, a soldier tells Hinrigh about silenced wiring workers and a room that appears on no ship plan, behind Room 3101's missing bathroom wall. The blueprints have been lying since launch.

Luini surfaces at the Cha-R office proposing the Troupe help him kill both families, the royals, and then the old world. Nobunaga stabs him mid-pitch, bisects the corpse, and leaves it as the Troupe's declaration of war on the Heil-Ly.

Led to the hidden room, Corporal Maizan steps inside and vanishes; an unbothered old man — someone's projected double — invites the underbosses in after him. The Heil-Ly's front door is a teleport trap.

Expecting her hideout's exposure, Morena assigns Sodom and Dogman to capture one of the Fourth Prince's personal soldiers and infect them with Contagion — a tracking device made of loyalty. The roster of her leveled killers, day jobs and all, parades past the reader.

Five ordinary soldiers on Tier 3 — Tserriednich's actual friends since academy days — piece together Nen, Morena, and their prince's silence from barracks gossip and Borksen's tip about Theta. They set up a transfer-request early-warning system for the coming purge.

After the Spiders map the trap as a continuous 'land mine' type, Hinrigh turns a transmitter into a raw oyster with Biohazard, swallows it, and walks into the teleporter himself — betting his life that the Troupe will follow the signal.

Inside the hideout, the Heil-Ly lawyer Yokotani activates A Battle of Wits: 'LSDF' — untouchable puppet guards that charge intruders with their actual crimes and eject them. Nobunaga is carried out and warped back to Room 3101; Hinrigh hides the oyster transmitter before his own expulsion.

Tracking the swallowed oyster, the Spiders read the Heil-Ly hideout as sitting above Tier 3 — meaning Morena has technically never been on her own turf, exploiting the very custom that legitimizes the war. Nobunaga starts to respect the enemy's architect.

Morena greenlights her endgame's first step: Dogman, level 62, can smell Nen types at five meters and certainty at a sniff. He and Sodom — whose kidnap ability works only on non-users — will trawl the funeral crowds for the specialist Morena needs.

After Tajao pledges the Cha-R and Xi-Yu's full support to the Troupe's Heil-Ly extermination, Ken'i privately addresses Morena — 'we have a problem' — and considers deploying their 'joker.' The Cha-R underboss has been hers all along.

Tajao leads three Spiders up through the ship's outermost shell and the sewage plant between Tiers 4 and 5 — subcontracted turf where, Nobunaga realizes, killers posing as waste contractors could murder on an assembly line. Phinks and Feitan continue up; Nobunaga turns back toward the Heil-Ly.

Thirty minutes after her last check-in, the soldier Borksen — one of Tserriednich's five friends — is gone without witnesses. Her squad, bound by their own no-rescue pact, can only theorize; the reader sees her wake across a card table from Morena.

Recruitment as ritual: seven face-up cards for the 'parent,' five face-down for the 'child,' the last card standing the answer. Yes means joining; No, death; X voids everything — even their secrets. Borksen, reading three traps deep, agrees to play.

'Morena Prudo' is in a marked grave; the woman across the table is a Carne Levare orphan — child of a villager forced to 'entertain' visiting royalty to death, scarred at birth, sorted as 'flesh' by the Heil-Ly's trafficking ring, and used for twenty years before taking the family over. Her goal: Kakin's destruction, then humanity's.

Morena explains her Contagion openly — a mother-and-22-children pyramid granting abilities toward shared goals — and why Borksen matters: she is an unawakened Specialist, one in three thousand, needed for the ability that fills Morena's most critical slot. Her sniffer has already flagged other specialists aboard, including an excited note about a Heavens Arena Floor Master.

Mid-game, the ship's speakers announce Special Martial Law — not a drill. Every royal soldier now holds shoot-without-warning authority; the game between Morena and Borksen continues under the sirens of the ship's new order.

Through yes/no questioning Borksen extracts the answer that reframes the whole war: the Heil-Ly base occupies the space between Tiers 2 and 3, near the central gate, with five entrances and 21 members — infrastructure planned before the Black Whale was built.

Borksen buys back the X card by granting Morena's 'small request' — a kiss that is itself an infection condition. Joining requires all three: a final Yes, Morena's kiss, and witnessing a Heil-Ly murder. Two of three are now done without Borksen ever agreeing.

Borksen marked the Return card during the kiss — and the game itself is Morena's ability, its manipulation triggering on any cheat. Screaming inside a body that only points and says 'Yes,' Borksen joins the Heil-Ly at level 0, assumes Morena sees through her eyes, and asks for a tour of her new comrades.