The throne room lies in ruins—columns split, marble shattered, the dais cracked down the middle.
Tot Musica fills the horizon, a towering blot against a sky washed in peach and violet, the colors running together like wet paint over a fresh bruise. The Uta clone hovers above the wreckage, weightless, rippling like silk on an updraft. Sing Sing soldiers flicker into being along the perimeter—glassy figures with hollow sockets, their mouths locked open around a song no one can hear. From the debris, dream phantoms drag themselves upward, unfinished: arms that taper into stumps, faces smoothed blank as river stones, bodies that gutter in and out like candle flames in a draft.
Shachi flinches.
Something cold and clammy has closed around his ankle. He looks down. A hand—pale as wax, nearly see-through, its fingers spindly and too long—has pushed up through a crack in the flagstones.
"What the hell?!"
Ember giggles. She tilts her head, neon-pink space buns bobbing, and studies the hand with mismatched eyes gone bright and greedy, as if someone had left her a present in the rubble.
"Eww. What's that?"
She shoulders Helltide, her slingshot rifle, and draws the heavy latex bands back until they creak. She sights down on the hand.
"Wonder what happens if I make it go Boom?"
She squeezes the trigger.
BA-GYUN!!
A sparkler round shrieks out of the barrel and slams into the ground. The blast is small—a sharp crack, a spit of hot pink and yellow—but when the smoke thins, the hand is gone and the stones around it are scorched black.
Shachi stumbles backward, arms windmilling.
"Are you insane?! Watch where you shoot that thing!"
Atlas chuckles low in his chest. His rust-red fur ruffles, and his nub sweeps lazily behind him.
"Should have seen that coming."
Shachi scoffs and plants his hands on his hips, cheeks flushed. "Yeah, right. She's shit crazy."
Atlas's mouth curls. His blue, slit-pupiled eyes glint—half amusement, half grudging respect.
"You're acting like it's some sort of secret. Just be happy she's on our side."
Shachi weighs that. He glances at Ember, who is squealing and bouncing on her heels as the smoke drifts off the fresh crater.
"BOOM! BOOM! Fun time!"
Shachi looks back at Atlas. "You sure about that?"
Atlas shrugs. "Mostly."
Bonk Punch looks back and jerks his chin toward Tot Musica, his broad shoulders blotting out a slice of the stained sky. Perched on one of them, Monster—his pint-sized, perpetually furious monkey—peels back his lips and bares his teeth.
"Hey. Be ready."
Shachi rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. The show is about to begin."
---
Beneath that smeared peach-and-violet sky, the shattered throne room lies like a broken instrument, its last note caught among the stones. Dust sifts through the cold air, fine and pale as ground bone.
Above the debris, the clone drifts.
Tot Musica bleeds up through Uta's pale features like ink through wet paper—one socket gone void-black and blind, the other branded with a red cross, the jaw split into a grin that runs past the edges of human skin. Behind her, the cosmic strings from a snapped monochord shiver in the air, droning at a pitch low and sickly enough to turn mortal resolve to stone.
Opposite her, Monkey D. Luffy hovers an inch above the cracked flagstones, blazing with the radiance of Gear Five. His hair streams like white smoke. His ruby eyes are huge and shining, alight with glee. The Drums of Liberation pound out their thump-thump-thump against the demon's static—a steady, sun-hot heartbeat that refuses to let anything stand still.
The demon speaks first, and not from one throat. Its voice is a fugue gone rotten—three voices grinding together into one chord, a young girl's lilt dragged under by an ancient brass bellow that rasps like a corroded horn.
"Look at you, laughing sun," the clone purrs. Her head lolls at a broken angle. Behind her eyes, the void churns like boiling tar. "Still bouncing. Still trying to stretch a world that was cast in iron eight hundred years ago. Do you know what this place is, Luffy? It's the final measure. The Great Work finished without your noisy dawn. They carved the four corners into the stone below to keep the air dead, and locked the words behind black glass so no one would ever have to cry again. Why do you fight the rest? In my world, Atalanta stops running. The music never has to resolve because the curtain never drops!"
Luffy digs his sandaled heels into the broken stone and plants his fists on his hips, shoulders bobbing to a beat only he can hear. He squints and shoves his lower lip out, thoroughly unimpressed.
"I DON'T CARE!"
His white brows crunch together into a scowl that is equal parts furious and ridiculous.
"GIVE UTA BACK! SHE JUST WANTS TO SING!"
The demon's jaw drops wider still. A shrill, many-toned screech tears out of its chest, and needle-thin black staff lines scratch themselves across the sky, carving the clouds into quavers and rests.
"They wanted the quiet!" Tot Musica roars through the clone's throat. Countless lost sleepers moan beneath every syllable. "Every voice on the sea is out of tune! The ancients knew it! The string is severed! The mortal world is grief, hunger, and executioners! I am the Great Cantus firmus—the absolute peace where no chord can ever be broken again! If you break this dream, they go back to starving! They go back to dying! Why take them back to a world where they weep?!"
Luffy's laughter punches through the screech—a bright, ringing "Ahyahyahya!" that makes the air itself go soft and bouncy. He winds his arm behind his back into a tight, corkscrewing spiral. His grin splits his face wide as white steam jets from his nostrils.
"Because they're alive, idiot!"
His voice rings with a king's certainty—the voice the whole sea answers to.
"People cry when they're sad, and they eat meat when they're happy! If you're scared of getting hurt, you can't ever set sail! Uta isn't yours, and this song isn't hers! Give her back right now, or I'm gonna punch that stupid tune right out of your teeth!"
GWAAAN—!!
No projectile flies. Instead, the space between them crushes inward. Tot Musica drives a horned limb forward, and forty jagged glyphs of musical script flare in the air, white-hot as branding irons. The sound condenses into a geometric beam—a razor-thin plane of infrasound built to carve the spirit out of the body.
It scythes across the throne room faster than the eye can follow. The last standing pillars split along a clean diagonal, the marble crumbling to powder before the upper halves can strike the floor.
Luffy's eyeballs shoot two feet out of their sockets on stretchy stalks, then snap home with a sharp thwap.
"WHOA! TOO CLOSE!"
He doesn't dodge. Luffy drops his hands, sinks his fingers deep into the broken flagstones, and heaves upward with a triumphant grunt.
BA-GWOOOSH!!
The bedrock peels away like warm taffy. Luffy hauls the stone floor ten paces into the air, where it hangs as a towering, wobbling wall of rubber.
The sound beam hits the rubberized bedrock and stalls. The stone doesn't shatter; it gives, sinking inward and ballooning out the back like an overblown bubble. Luffy braces his feet, inflates his cheeks until they're barrel-round, and lets go.
TWAAAANG!!
The floor whips back like a released bowstring, hurling the demon's own beam straight into its chest.
BA-DOOOM!!
The blast erupts against Tot Musica's breastplate, flinging white sparks and black smoke across the sky. The demon shrieks—a clatter of brass keys and snapping piano wire that sends a tremor through every corner of the dream realm.
"Ahyahyahya!" Luffy cackles. He springs off the still-quivering floor and somersaults three times through the air, whipping his right arm back and twisting it into a dense white coil that whistles like a boiling kettle.
"Hey, ugly!"
Luffy roars, plummeting toward the floating clone. Thick, crackling tendrils of Conqueror's Haki crawl over his golden fist and stain it black.
"I told you! GIVE UTA BACK!"
"GUM-GUM NO... MOLE PISTON!!"
The first chord crashes down. The final battle for Elegia has begun.