Author's note: Sorry for the long silence, everyone! Life has been really hectic lately because we just welcomed a new baby into the family. Thank you so much for your patience and support. To make up for it, here are 5 chapters at once, and regular updates start again from today.
-Broadcast-
Mary Geoise had not seen anything like this since Fisher Tiger.
The last time the Holy Land had been breached, one man had come and broken the slave records and walked out. This time, the city was full of people who had come for different reasons and were taking different things, and the Celestial Dragons who had ruled from behind their oxygen masks for generations were discovering that the gap between divine status and a sword was not as wide as they had believed.
Some of them had made it to the streets before dying. Some had been found in their homes. The Amazon Lily warriors moved through the private residences with the efficient thoroughness of people who had very clear ideas about what they were there to do, and the Celestial Dragon family members they encountered in those rooms were beyond frightened — petrified, some of them literally, statue-still in the corners of rooms full of everything gold had ever been able to buy.
Diana was in the library.
She moved along the shelves with a scholar's attention — pulling volumes, opening them to the first page, setting them back or passing them to the women behind her based on what the first page told her. Some of these books had no equivalents anywhere outside this room. They had been locked here for generations, accumulating dust in service of no reader, accessible only to people who had decided that knowledge's highest purpose was to be owned rather than used.
She had not expected to feel this much anger about a library.
"Take everything from this room," she said, without looking up. "Carefully. These are old — some of them are fragile. Don't stack them against each other without padding."
She heard acknowledgment from behind her and kept moving along the shelves.
Hancock was seated near the window. Her posture was composed, her beauty as total and as unchanging as it had ever been — the kind of face that made the Sky Screen audiences outside forget, briefly, that there was a war happening around her. She had not opened her eyes since they arrived.
She hadn't opened them since Nine Snake Island.
"Diana." Her voice was quiet and unhurried. "We have limited time. The fighting could reach our people."
She had said "our people" deliberately. Diana registered the deliberate quality of it.
After Nine Snake Island, Hancock had taken her body back. The process had not been clean — Medusa's influence, the Mero Mero no Mi's other consciousness, had left marks that did not simply heal. When Hancock opened her eyes, what came out was no longer infatuation or charm. It was petrification, immediate and irreversible, and it did not discriminate between friend and enemy. She had tried to correct it. Every method she had found failed.
She had accepted it the way one accepted the terms of a war: without approval, but without the luxury of refusal.
What she had gained in exchange was an Observation Haki that had been forced, through the loss of sight, to become something different. She built pictures of people from heartbeat and breath and the particular density of their presence, and those pictures were often clearer than vision had been.
The two of them had recovered on Amazon Lily. The island's hot springs had healed things that medicine could not have reached — Diana's arm, severed in the battle, had regenerated in the water, new and exactly as it had been. Hancock's soul had knit itself back together in the same springs, enough that Medusa's taking had remained partial rather than complete.
"Buggy went after whoever is behind the Five Elders," Diana said, closing a volume and passing it back. "No retreat signal yet." She considered the window for a moment. "I'm inclined to take what we have and go. The men can find their own way back."
This was not a statement about logistics. It was a statement about what today had cost and what today had given back, and Diana intended the accounting to favor her people before it favored anyone else.
The Holy Land's wealth, removed from the families who had accumulated it across generations of enforced hierarchy, would change the material reality of Amazon Lily for years. Trading confidence. Independence from the kinds of commercial manipulation that isolated island communities were usually vulnerable to. Things Diana had calculated before the first Amazon set foot on this soil.
Hancock had killed today without restraint. Every Celestial Dragon she had found, regardless of age, regardless of what they had or hadn't personally done. Diana had stopped her twice from extending that judgment to the slaves — people who had done nothing except exist in proximity to the wrong owners.
Most of the slaves had escaped in the chaos. That was what Hancock had intended, underneath the rage — the thing she shared with Fisher Tiger, the impulse to open every lock before leaving. The slaves who made it home would carry these events back with them, and the people in those villages would hear about the day the gods had been cut down like anyone else, and the thousands of years of accumulated mystique would not survive the story.
That was worth more than gold. Diana thought Hancock understood this.
The fighting in the outer districts was loud enough to carry to the library windows.
Edward Weevil was the source of most of it.
He was not subtle. He was very large, with a physique built along the lines of something structural rather than human-proportioned, limbs like load-bearing columns, a belly that strained the limits of his clothing's engineering. His face carried a weight of years that had not been spent comfortably, and the white beard curved upward at the ends in a crescent — thinner than his father's, longer, deliberate in a way that suggested someone had studied images of Edward Newgate very carefully and then tried to replicate what they saw.
The sword he carried was not Murakumogiri. It was a near-copy — the same approximate shape and weight, constructed to look like the Supreme Grade blade it was not. He had grown up without meeting his father. He was doing the next best thing.
He was not fast and he was not technically precise and he did not particularly care about either of these things, because he was carrying enough force that technical precision was an optional extra. God's Knights who encountered him encountered him briefly. The ones who had seen what happened to the first several had opted for distance.
He was currently fighting someone who was not a God's Knight and not a Marine and not a pirate.
The man facing Weevil was younger, carried a black hammer, and wore the uniform that this new faction had adopted: a close-fitting combination of black and white, fitted rather than armored, that had become recognizable in the past hour as the indicator of an organized third party with coordinated positions across the district.
They had arrived late, after the initial breach. They had not joined the attack on the Celestial Dragons and they had not evacuated with the World Government's own personnel. They had inserted themselves between the two forces and begun holding ground.
Their reasoning was structural rather than loyal: if the World Government collapsed completely in a single afternoon, the power vacuum that followed would be worse than the government it replaced. Ambition filled vacuums. There were enough ambitious parties watching this from a distance that a sudden absence of any organizing authority would produce years of instability before anything settled.
They needed the World Government weakened, not ended. There was a difference, and they had come to enforce it.
The man with the black hammer blocked one of Weevil's swings and absorbed the impact through bent knees and good timing, which was the only available option when the incoming force was that magnitude.
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