Chapter 535: Inside Pluton
Pluton was not a small vessel.
As the warship legendary for being able to destroy an island in a single shot, it wasn't quite island-sized itself, but it was nowhere close to modest. The hull ran somewhere between three and four hundred meters in length. By any reasonable measure, it was enormous.
On open water or flat ground, moving it would have been trivial for Brett. Raw physical strength alone could have managed it, never mind his flame clouds. The problem was that he was currently deep underground in a sealed space, and getting Pluton out through solid rock required a bit more thought.
The extraction itself wasn't the hard part. Carving a passage large enough for a warship through the earth was well within Brett's current abilities - straightforward, even.
The difficulty was choosing where to carve it.
This was deep underground. One careless move and he risked destabilizing the rock layers above, potentially bringing disaster to whatever was on the surface. That required care.
Brett spread his Observation Haki outward and studied the surrounding geology.
Joy Boy had left Pluton here deliberately, and had arranged for Zunesha to retrieve it. That meant he'd planned for this. Brett doubted very much that Joy Boy would have designed the recovery process to come at Wano's expense.
He found what he was looking for quickly enough.
There was already a passage. Rough and sealed over, but unmistakably intentional - wide enough that his Observation Haki identified it immediately as a prepared route. Probably sized for Zunesha to insert his trunk and draw Pluton out directly.
Convenient, under the circumstances.
Brett reversed direction and flew toward it. The wall at the passage entrance looked ordinary, but one solid impact blew it open into a wide hole. The tunnel beyond stretched upward into darkness - the kind of dark that felt like it had weight to it.
Brett entered, pulling Pluton behind him, and flew upward along the passage.
He hit one more sealed wall further up. Same treatment. It gave way.
Darkness ended. Open sky.
Brett emerged into the air above Wano, Pluton trailing behind him on a cradle of flame clouds. He took a quick read of his position - this area had been part of the inland sea before, somewhere in the direction of the old Ringo region.
Under normal circumstances, the intended sequence would have been: open Wano first, then have Zunesha drain the lava and pull Pluton free. Looking at it now, Brett was fairly sure he could have skipped Zunesha entirely and extracted it himself even with the sea still in place. Water wasn't much of an obstacle for him.
He turned and looked back at the ship properly for the first time in full daylight.
The hull was streaked with obsidian - magma that had cooled and solidified against the metal over the centuries, leaving the surface rough and irregular in places. Beneath it, the original lines of the warship were still clearly visible. Long and black, with rows of gun barrels that projected a menace even sitting perfectly still.
Just looking at it made you want to know what it was capable of.
Though.
Brett considered the problem. Pluton wasn't going to be combat-ready immediately. Eight hundred years in a lava lake had a way of clogging things up. The material itself had held - no erosion, no structural damage - but every pipe, every channel, every internal mechanism needed to be cleared and checked before he put a single shot through those barrels.
If a gun that size backfired, the results would not be subtle.
Something to attend to. For now, he turned and headed back toward where Yamato and the others had gathered, pulling the ancient warship along behind him.
She'd said she wanted to see it. Fair enough.
Even towing a three-to-four-hundred-meter warship, Brett moved at a pace that covered the breadth of Wano in short order. He followed the threads of familiar aura and found them where the retreating water had exposed a patch of old ruins, which the group had apparently decided to explore.
A sudden shadow fell across Yamato.
She looked up reflexively.
An enormous black warship hung in the sky above her. Next to it, looking very small by comparison, was a single figure.
"Brett?"
She launched herself upward in a single jump, clearing several hundred meters without effort.
"Is this Pluton? It's incredible!"
Brett caught her with a cloud before she could do anything reckless, then brought the ship down slowly and set it on the ground outside the ruins. The earth was still soft from eight hundred years of waterlogging - when Pluton settled onto it, the ground compressed visibly under the weight.
Brett set Yamato down on the deck and landed beside her.
"Eight hundred years in magma left it looking a bit rough," he said, looking along the hull. "But you can still see what it's supposed to look like."
"Yes, yes, yes!" Yamato turned in a slow circle on the deck, taking everything in. "It's an incredibly cool ship."
"Want to see the inside?"
Brett's mouth curved slightly.
"Yes, yes, yes!"
Her head moved fast enough that it almost blurred.
"Then let's go."
Brett glanced toward the hull. Sealed under rock, but the outline of the entrance was obvious enough - a heavy metal door set into the ship's side. Brett reached out with a lazy sweep of flame clouds, crushed the sealing stone to powder, and pushed the door open.
What struck him first was the smell. Or rather, the absence of it. No rot, no must, no closed-air staleness. The air coming through the open door was, impossibly, fresh.
Eight hundred years sealed in magma beneath the earth. And the air inside was fresh.
When Brett stepped through the doorway, the interior of the ship lit up around him.
"Welcome, successor."
A calm, measured voice filled the space.
Brett paused.
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