The deck of the Going Merry fell silent. It was the kind of quiet that made you aware of every creak of the ship's wood.
The original members of the Straw Hat crew, those who'd been with Luffy from the beginning, wore particularly conflicted expressions.
When Marcus had first joined, he'd kept his cards close to his chest. Sure, everyone could tell he was stronger than Usopp, and if he used his abilities cleverly, he could probably hold his own against Zoro, Sanji, or Luffy in a fight. That had been the general assessment.
But now? How much time had even passed since then? A few months at most?
The speed at which he had grown was frankly terrifying. Especially after he'd gotten the Shichiseiken.
Alvida was the first to notice the shift in atmosphere, her eyes darting between crew members as she read the room. Her expression grew complicated as a memory surfaced. She remembered Marcus saying that a pirate crew was like a nation, and that a nation was built on strength, with the strongest person usually leading.
At the time, she'd thought it was just philosophical rambling. Now those words felt prophetic.
The problem was obvious to anyone who'd captained their own ship: the strongest person on the Going Merry wasn't Luffy anymore. It was Marcus.
Under normal pirate crew dynamics, that meant trouble. Big trouble.
She knew from experience what that situation felt like. Back when she'd been a captain, if she'd had someone that powerful under her command, she wouldn't have been able to sleep at night. Every moment would've been spent worrying about when he'd decide to take her position. The smart move would've been to kick him off the ship before things got complicated.
If you tried to keep someone that powerful around, you'd gradually lose your authority. Your crew would start looking to the stronger person for leadership, whether they meant to or not. Your word would carry less weight. Eventually, you'd just be a figurehead.
She'd seen it happen before. Back in Syrup Village, when Jango and Kuro had that confrontation, once Kuro decided to return to piracy, Jango's days as captain were numbered. He'd either get kicked out or killed.
But the Straw Hats weren't a normal crew. She'd learned that much over their time together.
Still, watching the awkward silence stretch out made her nervous. She'd grown comfortable with the casual, easy dynamic this crew had. She didn't want that to change.
"Guys..." She tried to break the tension. But before she could say anything meaningful, Luffy's face lit up like a kid who'd just seen the coolest thing ever.
"That was AWESOME!" he shouted.
Alvida's mouth hung open.
Right. This was Luffy. Of course he didn't care about power dynamics or potential threats to his authority. He'd just seen something cool and that was literally all that mattered to him.
The rest of the crew exhaled.
"Yep, that's Luffy," Zoro muttered, a small smirk on his face.
Usopp laughed nervously. "Had me worried there for a second."
Alvida stared at them. They hadn't been worried about Marcus trying to take over the ship. They'd been worried about him losing control to the cursed sword and going berserk.
That realization made her want to laugh and cry at the same time. Of course. The Straw Hat crew had never been about strength determining leadership. They followed Luffy because they wanted to, not because he could beat them in a fight.
"You guys are something else."
While this was happening, Vivi had walked over to examine the situation more closely. She looked at Marcus, then at the Shichiseiken at his waist, then down at Enel's unconscious form on the deck.
Since eating the Whisper-Whisper Fruit, she'd been developing her abilities bit by bit. It had started with hearing heartbeats from farther away, then understanding the emotions behind them. Now she was picking up on connections between people and objects.
"Your relationship with the Shichiseiken is really weird," she said, tilting her head as she studied the cursed blade.
"What?" Marcus looked confused.
Vivi's expression grew thoughtful, like she was trying to translate something she was hearing into words that would make sense. "The Shichiseiken is... it's a good blade. Don't let it down, okay?"
"What are you talking about?" Marcus blinked at her like she'd started speaking another language.
Vivi just shrugged, apparently not planning to elaborate.
Before Marcus could press her for details, Gan Fall threw himself forward, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to reach them.
"Are you a warrior from the Blue Sea?" His breathing had grown heavy, like he'd just run a marathon. "Could I trouble you to entrust that man to me?"
The old knight was staring at Enel's unconscious body with an intensity that made Marcus uncomfortable.
"Whoa, hey, personal space," he pushed Gan Fall's face away as the old man got too close. "Calm down for a second there."
Gan Fall seemed to realize how he must have looked and took a step back, composing himself. Then he straightened his posture and began a formal introduction, or rather, reintroduction.
"My apologies. I should properly introduce myself. My name is Gan Fall, and I was once... once the God of Skypiea."
That got everyone's attention.
Somewhere during the commotion, Wyper had managed to drag himself back aboard the ship. He looked at Gan Fall with undisguised contempt.
"Once the God, huh? More like you got kicked off your throne when Enel showed up. The only reason you're still alive is because Skypiea still needed your priests and officials to run things. Otherwise, you'd have been dead years ago."
It was a brutal assessment, but Gan Fall didn't get angry. He couldn't really argue with the truth.
He sighed heavily. "You're not wrong. But I want you to know, I have no interest in reclaiming that title. I'm done being a god. These days, all I want is to live as a farmer, grow pumpkins, maybe enjoy what's left of my life in peace."
He paused, looking around at the assembled Straw Hats. "The only reason I'm revealing myself now is because I want to see Skypiea freed from Enel's oppression. That's all."
Wyper snorted but didn't say anything more. His opinion of the situation was clear from his expression.
At present, all of Skypiea was under Enel's tyrannical rule, through fear and thought control. On the surface, it seemed peaceful as ever, but the people had long since grown numb.
Rebellion? How could humans rebel against a god?
That belief had been branded deep into their hearts, even into their souls.
After all, God could hear every conversation. Speak ill of him, even in the privacy of your own home, and punishment would follow.
So rebellion? Impossible. You couldn't even plot in secret, let alone organize a revolt. How would you organize resistance when the enemy could hear you plotting?
Naturally, he had no respect for the Skypieans, he saw them as nothing more than lambs waiting for slaughter.
Vivi caught onto a few key words and asked a few curious questions.
That opened the floodgates. Gan Fall began describing everything that had happened since Enel's arrival, and also all that had transpired during his own time as God.
Wyper jumped in whenever Gan Fall said something he disagreed with, offering corrections from the Shandian perspective. It quickly became clear that both men were telling the truth as they understood it, they just had very different viewpoints shaped by years of conflict.
Vivi listened carefully, her Whisper-Whisper Fruit abilities letting her read between the lines.
Both men were being remarkably straightforward. Neither was lying.
Gan Fall genuinely wanted peace between the Skypieans and Shandians. That much was obvious from how his heart rate stayed steady when he talked about reconciliation, no spike of deception.
But four hundred years of conflict had created a situation where the original invaders, the Skypieans, now considered Upper Yard their homeland, while the original inhabitants, the Shandians, had become the "invaders" trying to reclaim their lost land.
There had been brief periods of peace, even intermarriage between the two groups. But those times never lasted. Old hatreds ran too deep.
The crew listened with varying degrees of attention. Nami and Zoro seemed interested. Chopper looked distressed by the whole conflict.
Luffy, predictably, had a snot bubble growing and shrinking from his nose as he dozed off. Politics and history weren't his thing.
Robin had been listening quietly throughout Gan Fall's explanation, one of her extra hands summoning a book from somewhere. She leafed through it absently while processing the information.
"If that's the case, then everything makes sense now."
Her words caught everyone's attention. The crew members who'd been half-listening to the history lesson suddenly focused on the book in her hands.
"Noland the Liar" storybook. The cover showed a cartoonish illustration of a man with an exaggerated nose.
"Wait, that old story?" Sanji perked up. "I remember reading it as a child."
Robin nodded, her expression thoughtful as she flipped through the pages. "The war between the Skypieans and Shandians began four hundred years ago. Noland, the so-called 'King of Liars,' lived four hundred years ago. If my guess is correct, the present-day Upper Yard should be the 'City of Gold' that Noland spoke of before his execution."
The deck fell silent as everyone processed this information.
Gan Fall and Wyper both possessed relatively complete knowledge of their peoples' histories, even if they disagreed on the interpretation. Between the two of them, along with Robin's deductions, a coherent timeline began to emerge.
Four hundred years ago, the ancestors of the Shandians and their island home had been blasted into the sky by a phenomenon known as the Knock Up Stream. They'd arrived weak, gasping for air in the thin atmosphere, their bodies struggling to adapt to the altitude.
The native Skypieans, seeing this new land appear in their White Sea, had naturally tried to claim it. To them, it was a gift from the gods, new territory with earth, something impossibly rare and valuable in the sky.
To the Shandians, it was their homeland being invaded while they were at their weakest.
The first battles had been brutal and one-sided. The oxygen-deprived Shandians had been driven from Upper Yard, forced to retreat and regroup while their bodies adapted to their new environment.
But by the time the Shandians had recovered and were ready to fight back, the Skypieans had already made use of Upper Yard's resources. They'd discovered iron ore, something that simply didn't exist naturally on the cloud islands. With both Dials and iron weaponry, their military power had grown exponentially.
The war that followed had stretched across centuries. The Shandians and Skypieans had fought back and forth. Sometimes they'd even intermarried, creating families that straddled both cultures. But inevitably, the conflict would flare up again. The Shandians' smaller population meant they were gradually losing ground, no matter how fiercely they fought.
And as time passed, the narrative shifted. The Skypieans, who had originally invaded Upper Yard, became seen as the rightful inhabitants. The Shandians, who were the original owners of the land, became branded as invaders trying to steal territory.
Wyper's jaw clenched as he listened to this recounting. Every word was accurate, but hearing it laid out made his blood boil.
Generations had been born, fought, and died without ever knowing peace. Children grew up learning to hate the other side before they could even form their own opinions.
During Enel's reign of terror, both Shandians and Skypieans had been under his thumb. Neither side could afford to fight each other when a god who could hear their every word was waiting to strike them down for any perceived slight.
That enforced peace had given the Shandia time to recover. Their population had grown. Their warriors had trained in secret. They'd been planning a coordinated assault to kill Enel himself.
And then Marcus had shown up and made all that planning irrelevant by beating Enel.
Because of that, Wyper was even willing to communicate.
"Vearth belongs to Shandia. We are the rightful inheritors. The Skypieans are the invaders, they're the ones who need to leave!"
He stood on the moral high ground of history, and everyone there knew it. Looking back through the centuries, the Shandians were clearly the original owners of the land.
Gan Fall rubbed his temples. This was the same debate he'd wrestled with years ago when he'd been God of Skypiea.
He wasn't a warmonger. He'd always known the true history of the conflict. He'd understood that the Skypieans were the original aggressors.
Sitting in the seat of God, he could never have chosen to simply hand over Upper Yard. It wasn't just about the land itself, though the earth was invaluable to his people. It was about the generations of Skypieans who'd been born there, and built their lives and homes on that soil. What right did he have to uproot them?
So he'd tried a different approach: unity. If the two peoples could become one family, then the question of who had invaded whom would become irrelevant. They could share the land as one people.
And for a while, it had actually worked. Some Shandians had chosen to accept this coexistence. Then Enel had shown up and burned it all to the ground.
"Wyper, four hundred years is an incredibly long time. The Skypieans have grown accustomed to living in Upper Yard. Many of them were born there. They've known no other home. To them, asking them to leave is—"
"Hypocritical!" Wyper cut him off. "And besides, you're not even the one who defeated Enel. You have no right to negotiate on behalf of anyone."
The temperature seemed to drop a few degrees as the two men glared at each other. It looked like they were about to fall back into the same old arguments.
That's when Vivi stepped between them.
"Hold on! Both of you need to stop for a second, because this isn't the time for you to be dividing territory!"
Both men turned to look at her.
"Even though Enel was defeated, it was our crew who defeated him. That means, technically speaking, we're the ones with the most say over what happens next."
Gan Fall closed his mouth. She had a point. The Straw Hats had taken down the god. By Skypiean logic, that made them the new rulers.
Wyper's eyes widened, his jaw clenching as he tried to formulate a counterargument.
For a moment, Vivi worried he might actually jump up and start a fight. The Shandian warrior looked like he was two seconds away from exploding. But then he just looked away.
"...Fine."
He clearly didn't like it, but he was forcing himself to accept it. The Straw Hats had proven their strength.
Vivi felt a headache coming on. The situation was incredibly complicated.
This wasn't just about dividing up resources, nor was it about who was right or wrong.
After four hundred years, the concepts of justice and guilt had been overturned so many times that they'd lost all meaning. The invaders had become victims. The victims had become invaders.
She could see clearly that only two possible outcomes awaited these two peoples.
Either they would remain enemies until one side was completely annihilated, genocide born from generations of hatred. Or they would merge, becoming one people with shared culture and mixed bloodlines, inseparable from each other.
Opposition or unity?
Without question, she hoped for the latter. But she also knew that achieving true unity would be incredibly difficult.
The question was: how?
This wasn't like Arabasta, where Crocodile had been the clear external threat that united everyone against him. Here, the two peoples had been enemies for so long that the hatred was baked into their identities.
Vivi began to think deeply.
Meanwhile, Marcus stayed quiet, lost in his own thoughts.
He was thinking about a different ending. In the anime, Enel's ultimate attack, "Raigo," had completely destroyed Angel Island, forcing the surviving Skypieans and Shandians to live together in Upper Yard, eventually leading to their union.
But now... Marcus had captured the final boss right at the start of the arc. He'd changed the predetermined future.
Was that change for better or worse?
If they did nothing, it might lead to a bad ending. The conflict would probably just continue, cycling through the same pattern it had followed for centuries. The Shandians would keep trying to reclaim their homeland. The Skypieans would keep resisting. More people would die. Nothing would change.
He wanted to change that outcome. Partially because it was the right thing to do, but also, if he was being honest, because he wanted the experience points that would come from completing this arc.
And maybe there was only one real answer: introduce a third power.
In other words, let a third force become the new God of Skypiea. Right now, that third force could only be either the Straw Hat crew... or Enel.
Whether the new god was benevolent or tyrannical didn't really matter. Only under the pressure of a common enemy could the two former enemies truly join hands.
Vivi seemed to reach a similar conclusion. Her gaze fell on Marcus first, then finally settled on Enel's unconscious form.
After all, because of Enel, the Shandians and Skypieans had already begun standing on the same side. Maybe that dynamic could be used.
Marcus' expression turned strange as he followed her line of thinking. So this is still going basically the same way as the original story. Does that mean I can still get experience points from resolving it?
Vivi, however, wasn't thinking about that. She walked over to Marcus and began whispering her plan to him.
"If we leave Enel in charge, the two peoples would have a common enemy to unite against. We could control how much threat he poses, make sure he doesn't actually hurt anyone, but maintain him as a symbol that—"
"Vivi," Marcus interrupted her quietly. "What you're saying makes sense. I can follow the logic. But... I'm going to have to say no to that plan."
"Huh?" Vivi blinked at him in confusion. "Why? It would work, wouldn't it?"
Marcus looked at the unconscious Enel, then back at Vivi. A small smirk crossed his face.
"Rather than handing the initiative over to someone else... why don't we become the new Gods of Skypiea ourselves?"
Vivi stared at him blankly for a moment. Then her eyes widened.
The rest of the Straw Hat crew, who'd been following the historical discussion with varying levels of interest, suddenly turned their attention to Marcus and Vivi. Many of them had pieced together the basic situation but weren't particularly invested in the moral questions of who was right or wrong. Their focus was on something entirely different.
"What do you mean, new God?" Usopp asked, voicing what the others were thinking as well