Chapter 560: Birca
The star field was immense.
Against the absolute black of open space, countless stars burned at every level of brightness, some faint, some blazing, scattered without pattern or end.
"So this is what the stars look like."
Brett's group had moved out onto Hades's external deck. The ship was flying at a breathtaking speed, but Brett had released clouds to anchor everyone in place and raised a Haki barrier to deflect the wind that would otherwise have torn them apart.
Shanks smiled like a child and stretched his arm out toward the stars, as if he might gather all of them in one handful. "I have never seen anything this beautiful."
"Nothing like looking up from the Blue Sea." Iceberg, Tom's apprentice, was being held firmly in Brett's clouds. He was deeply moved. "This is — it's too beautiful."
Endless, boundless, without edge.
Mysterious and vast.
Brett himself felt a peace he had not touched in a long time.
Looking at the stars from here, a person finally understood how small they were. Ruling the ocean meant nothing when measured against all of this. Everything that seemed so consequential down there was, from this perspective, barely a flicker.
"Something even more astonishing is coming," Rayleigh said, laughing. He raised his right hand and pointed ahead. "The moon. We're almost there."
He was right. In the void ahead, a pale grey sphere hung in silence. Enormous and still.
It was genuinely close. The distance between this moon and the Blue Sea was far shorter than the distance Brett remembered between the Earth and its moon in his previous life. Hades was fast, but they had not been flying long, and already it filled the view ahead.
Who would have imagined that traveling between worlds could be this straightforward?
"The moon." Franky could barely contain himself. "We're actually going to land on the moon. This is the most SUPER day of my entire life."
The sphere ahead was growing rapidly, its surface expanding until it dominated the forward view. Hades, for all its size, was an ant before an elephant.
Though it was smaller than Brett expected.
He could not calculate the precise dimensions, but the moon in his previous life had been over three thousand kilometers in diameter, and this one was clearly much smaller. That made sense. Viewed from the Blue Sea it appeared roughly the same apparent size in the sky as the moon he remembered, but given the much shorter distance that meant the body itself had to be significantly smaller.
Hades was caught by the moon's gravity.
The gravitational pull was surprisingly strong for an object this size. Brett's personal sense of it was that it was not dramatically weaker than what he felt on the Blue Sea. He could not explain why. The One Piece world had its own rules. The Grand Line had weather that defied reason and magnetic fields that shattered compasses without warning. A moon with unexpectedly strong gravity was hardly the strangest thing in this world.
Hades began to circle above the lunar surface.
Everyone craned their necks to look down.
"So this is the moon." Shanks blinked. "It's barren."
The surface stretched away in every direction without any visible break. Dry, dusty ground with nothing growing on it. No sign of life anywhere.
"Which is precisely why the Bircans eventually abandoned their home and relocated to the Blue Sea."
Vegapunk's voice held genuine sorrow. "Nothing can live here. Nothing can survive."
"In any case, this is the perfect place to test Hades without worrying about anyone noticing."
Brett smiled. "Let's see what it can do."
"Now we're talking." The old man's excitement was immediate. He laughed heartily. "Hades, begin."
"Understood."
The blurred humanoid figure appeared before them.
A seam opened in Hades's bow. A single enormous gun barrel extended forward. Simultaneously, from the underside of the hull and along the leading edge of each steel wing, more barrels extended outward.
The corner of Brett's mouth twitched slightly. Was the aircraft still capable of normal flight with all of that deployed? Perhaps Hades flew on sheer thruster force alone and the wings were mostly decorative. He did not know enough about the underlying engineering to say.
He decided not to worry about it.
The largest barrel at the bow began to glow.
Then a massive beam screamed downward and struck the surface below in nearly the same instant it was fired.
Then came the light. White. Blindingly, completely white. It swallowed every other detail.
Hades completed one slow circle overhead as the explosion's light and smoke gradually thinned. The surface came back into view.
"Remarkable."
Rayleigh breathed the word.
Below them, from the center of an enormous crater, thick smoke was still rising. The crater was large enough to be compared to a small island. Its depth was something else entirely.
"Now this is the legendary Pluton, the warship said to sink an entire island with a single shot." Shanks clicked his tongue in wonder.
No exaggeration involved. What that single discharge had demonstrated was genuine island-destroying force.
"We're not finished."
Vegapunk laughed.
Then, full broadside.
Beam after beam poured down.
One by one, brilliant spheres of light bloomed across the surface below. The wind at altitude turned fierce and burning hot, sending everyone's hair whipping back.
In an instant, an entire stretch of the surface was swallowed by a chain of overlapping explosions.
"An attack like this —" Tom clicked his tongue slowly. "Even a great nation like Alabasta would be wiped out in moments."
Concentrated fire could sink an island. Scattered fire could exterminate every living thing on an island in seconds. Coverage, not just destruction. This was the ancient weapon's true nature.
Tom had built it himself and even he was shaken. He had not even spoken his usual verbal tic.
"Well? What do you think, Brett?" Vegapunk was laughing freely. "That is the power of Hades."
"How is the endurance?"
"Try and see." Vegapunk's grin widened. "Hades. Show him."
Light continued to rain from the steel aircraft as it flew forward. With every passing moment, another flower of fire bloomed on the surface below. Viewed from the darkness of space, the moon's surface would have looked like a slow chain of points of light linking together, eventually forming a thick white line stretching away into the distance.
That was Hades.
Its endurance required no further comment. It fired without pause as it flew forward, and neither its power output nor its speed showed any sign of diminishing.
Bircan energy technology was genuinely extraordinary.
Brett felt that with real sincerity.
Though speaking of the Bircans —
"Hades, stop."
Brett spoke up sharply.
"Brett?"
The bombardment halted.
"We've reached Birca."
Brett smiled.
Ahead on the surface, buried under layers of dust but stubbornly still visible, something was pushing through. Shapes. Outlines that could only mean one thing.
The traces of buildings. Or rather, ruins.
The ruins of Birca.