Shanks swings Griffon. The blade cleaves the air and looses a black-edged crescent of Haki that howls toward Tot Musica.
The demon unhinges its jaw. Darkness knots itself into a sphere between its teeth—dense, shrieking, ravenous—and fires.
The two forces collide.
The world goes white.
The shockwave shudders through the dream world down to its bedrock. The stage buckles. The air splinters like struck crystal. And at the heart of the flash, young Uta lets out a thin, piercing wail and drops to her knees, palms clamped over her ears.
Sanza goes down with her. His small arms lock around her shoulders and pull her in. His voice comes out fierce and cracking, the way a boy sounds when, for the first time in his life, he has someone to protect.
"It's okay. I won't—"
Shanks wrenches his head around. "UTA!"
He pivots to run to her—
And the dark comes down on him.
Bolts of negative energy hammer down from above—black lightning, shrieking shadow, a demon's long-starved hatred given aim. Shanks spins, Griffon flashing, batting strike after strike aside. Each impact shoves him backward, his boots scraping furrows across the stage.
He faces Tot Musica again. His eyes settle on the demon with a stillness more frightening than any shout.
Tot Musica tilts its head back. It laughs.
No throat could make that sound. It is a choir of ruined instruments—gears grinding, strings snapping, brass bleating out of tune—and it rolls across the dream world in waves.
"I will never let you have her!"
Sanza holds young Uta tight. She trembles against him, face pressed into his chest, whispering the same words again and again like a prayer she can't finish.
"No, please, don't. I just want to go home."
Sanza's jaw tightens. He lifts his gaze to Tot Musica—to the demon cackling at Shanks as it cages him in lashes of darkness, each detonation jolting the stage.
His eyes narrow.
He feels young Uta quaking. He feels her tears soak warm through his shirt. He feels the terror pouring off her small frame, steady as a fever.
And something in him that has always been held back tears loose.
"I WON'T LET YOU HURT HER ANYMORE!"
The shout deepens into a roar.
Golden light bursts from his body and takes shape: a towering, three-tailed tiger of shimmering aura that lunges across the stage at Tot Musica—not Sanza himself, but his spirit, his will, the Byakko blood in his veins made visible.
Tot Musica stops laughing.
Its head jerks toward the charging tiger. The single void of its eyes stretches wide.
For the first time, it is afraid.
Its jaws gape and spit a bolt of dark energy at the golden beast—
And the blast passes clean through, as if through mist.
The tiger leaps. Its fangs sink into Tot Musica's shoulder.
The demon howls.
It bucks and thrashes, trying to fling the tiger off. Its claws swipe at nothing. Its body shudders, fractures, and seeps darkness from every crack. The tiger hangs on, teeth buried deep in shadow and stone.
Shanks glances over his shoulder.
He sees Sanza—still clutching young Uta, still shielding her, his small face hard with a fury that burns gold. The same radiance wraps around them both.
A slow grin spreads across Shanks' face. "Well, I'll be damned. The kid is living up to his lineage."
Jannali curses. "Bloody hell!"
She plants herself at Shanks' side, Gosan gripped tight. Beneath her headscarf, her third eye throbs. When she speaks, her voice is clipped and all business.
"We can't just go hacking at the thing. It's wedged in too deep. We've got to get her out of here so Law can operate."
Shanks nods. "I'm open to suggestions."
Tot Musica bellows and tears the tiger loose from its shoulder. The beast scatters into drifting motes of light that gutter out one by one.
Jannali sighs. "I reckon I see a way out." She glances at Shanks. "You owe me a cold one, mate."
Shanks' grin widens.
Jannali turns to Sanza. Young Uta peeks out at her from over his shoulder, eyes wide.
"You need to get her away from here," Jannali tells him.
Sanza stares at her. "I don't know how to do that."
Jannali squints at him. "Far out. I thought you were meant to be the next supreme leader or somethin'. Sort it out!"
Sanza flinches as if slapped. Then he nods, and his expression sets, every trace of doubt pressed out of it.
"Right!"
Jannali turns to Shanks. "Watch my back, mate. I'm rooted."
Shanks answers with a nod, his fingers flexing around Griffon's hilt.
Jannali looks between them. "Ready?"
Shanks and Sanza nod as one.
Jannali fixes her attention on Tot Musica. The wound in its shoulder is already sealing, shadow and stone knitting themselves whole.
"Right then."
She levels her spear at the demon. She reaches up, grabs the edge of her patterned headscarf, and rips it away. All three of her eyes kindle with light.
"Let's go, you bloody bastard!"
Tot Musica convulses. Shrieks. Dark lightning pours down in jagged sheets.
Shanks meets every bolt. Griffon moves too fast to follow—parrying, blocking, weaving a barrier of steel and Haki between the demon and the two children at his back. The blows push him back a step, then another, but he gives no more ground than that.
And Jannali starts to dig her way into Tot Musica's mind.
---
The concert stage trembles under Jannali's heels.
Above her, Tot Musica rises into the bruise-colored storm clouds—a mountain of jagged stone, shredded music, and howling shadow. Its skeletal hands hang over the colosseum like theater curtains waiting to fall. Its hollow face splits wide in a silent shriek; beneath her feet, the floorboards tremble like strings, and her body becomes the instrument of its grief.
Jannali aims her spear. The wind whips at her proud afro. The skin at the center of her forehead parts. Her third eye opens and blazes, a lantern of gold against the dark.
She doesn't simply look at the monster. She listens. She drives her awakened mind past its hide of black smoke, between its ribs of shattered rock, and shoulders her way into its skull.
BOOM.
It is like diving headfirst into black water so cold it burns, with no bottom to find.
The concert hall is gone. Jannali stands on a plain of polished black glass that runs to every horizon. Under its surface, suspended like insects in amber, drift thousands of pale faces—men, women, and children from kingdoms long fallen, mouths stretched mid-scream, not a sound escaping them.
"What in the world...?" she breathes, her drawl pulled tight, heels braced against the slick glass.
There is no sky overhead. There is only an instrument—enormous, and broken.
A pillar climbs from the glass into the pitch-black clouds, long and fretted like a titan's guitar neck. Every string on it has been hacked, snapped, or frayed to threads. Rusted cables thick as ship masts dangle loose and whip against the dark. Tuning pegs the size of houses grind together with the shriek of locked train wheels, spraying cold green sparks.
Whenever the severed cables slap together, a low, nauseating vibration rolls through the floor. It isn't a tune. It is raw, ugly static—a sick hum so heavy it settles on her chest like a sandbag and presses the breath from her lungs.
And hanging at the very center of that false sky is an eye—a vast, burning thing of clockwork.
Two jagged, curving horns frame it, drawing the dark inward like a whirlpool and swallowing every stray thought and dream that drifts too near. Its pupil is a dead, eclipsed sun that weeps neon-green acid; the drops hiss where they land and eat pits into the black glass. Seven interlocking rings of white crystal circle the eye, each turning backward against the next with a grinding squeal that rattles her teeth.
Far off, a ghost of liquid silver flees across the smoking green pools, round and round without end, keening at a pitch sharp enough to split eardrums. On its heels lumbers a bellowing hulk of red, smoldering rock, forever chasing the silver runner and forever one stride short.
It is a song caught in a groove—an awful, broken loop that can never reach its final note.
It has a migraine, Jannali realizes, and her eyes go wide. The whole bloody thing is in agony.
Tot Musica doesn't think in words. It has no schemes, no speeches. Its whole mind is one eighty-thousand-ton headache—broken music that can't mend itself—and every heartbeat, every laugh, every voice in the waking world lands like a rusty nail driven into its skull. It doesn't want to rule the world. It wants to pound the world flat, if that's what it takes to make the screeching stop.
Without warning, the eclipsed eye swivels.
It settles on her and holds.
The glass plain heaves beneath her. At the edges of the dark, four crumbling stone towers flare to life, scored with burning glyphs as jagged as forked lightning. Then a voice strikes—not through her ears but straight into the core of her brain—like a stadium crowd roaring backward through tin megaphones:
SHUT... IT... DOWN! DIE... IN... THE... SILENCE!
The sound lands like a falling iron wall. Jannali is flung onto her back and sent skidding across the glass while an unseen weight pins her flat, trying to lock her limbs and pull her under with the rest of the silent faces.
"Get off me!" Jannali roars, shoving back against the crushing pressure of the noise.
Blood runs from her third eye, hot along the bridge of her nose, and she clenches her teeth against it. She gives no ground. Her gold hoop earrings sway as she drags herself upright, plants her sandals on the glass, and glares straight up into the eclipsed sun.
"You think you're tough, mate?!" she yells, her voice slicing clean through the demonic static. "You're nothing but a glorified music box with rusted-out gears! You're throwing a giant, eight-hundred-year temper tantrum because you don't know how to play in tune!"
She gathers the whole of her awakened mind and pours it into the Voice of All Things—not to fight the noise, but to find where it breaks.
And there it is.
Far beneath the grinding gears and the wailing silver ghost lies one small, clear note—a lonely hum buried under centuries of wreckage and noise. The monster isn't invincible; it is badly out of balance, held together by a knot of harmonics wound so tight and so brittle that the right counter-frequency will crack it apart like a wineglass under a held high note.
Across the black sky, seams of bright light begin to branch and spread.
"I hear ya now, you ugly brute," Jannali snarls, smearing the blood from her face with the back of her wrist as her third eye flares white-gold. "And I know exactly how to pull your plug."
With one savage mental shove, she severs the link and wrenches herself back out of the demon's head.