-Broadcast-
They were performing for an audience that wasn't there anymore.
Weevil swung his broadsword. Lavi swung his hammer. The weapons connected with a sound that was correct, and both men absorbed the impact with the kind of deliberate slowing-down that looked like effort from a distance and felt, up close, like two people trying not to accidentally hurt each other.
"Die, pirate!" Lavi said, with feeling.
Weevil blocked and did not respond in kind. He was thinking.
"There was someone watching," he said, under the noise of the swing. "My Observation Haki swept the area. Whoever it was, they're gone now." He looked at Lavi over the crossed weapons. "Are you sure?"
"My sixth sense doesn't give false positives," Lavi said. He let the hammer shrink back to a size he could carry over one shoulder — it moved without mechanism, reducing itself from something that could level a building to something that fit comfortably against his neck. He rolled his shoulders. "Gone now. We're clear."
Weevil pulled his broadsword out of the next block and drove the point into the ground. He found a section of relatively clean rubble and sat on it.
The pretend battle was more demanding than the real kind. Real fighting ran on instinct. Pretend fighting required managing every variable consciously, calibrating force, timing the beats, making sure nothing landed hard enough to cause an incident while still looking credible. By the end of it his head felt like it had been wrung out.
Captain Buggy had not sent new orders. Weevil decided this meant he had latitude.
He reached into his coat and produced a wine bottle — the last survivor of a cellar he had otherwise completely resolved. A fine vintage, from the label. He had been thrifty.
He held it toward Lavi. Lavi shook his head.
"I'm not twenty yet," Lavi said. "And if I go back to my people smelling like a Celestial Dragon's wine collection, I'll spend the next week explaining it."
Weevil uncapped the bottle with his teeth and drank.
He liked Lavi. He had met people who spoke to him the way people sometimes spoke at each other without meaning to, louder and slower and with an assumption of diminished capacity on the receiving end. Lavi had never done that. He spoke straight, said what he meant, and expected to be understood.
"Stay out of whatever's happening inside," Lavi said, after a while. His tone was easy but his eyes were not. "The big shots are running something that has pieces we're not going to see. The more you know about it, the more of a liability you become." He turned the hammer in his hand. "I've put flowers at too many graves already."
Weevil drank. He did not answer immediately.
He had his own version of this reasoning, and it led somewhere different. A small person couldn't always choose their involvement. Some currents were big enough that the only options were swimming or drowning; standing on the bank wasn't available. He had learned this at some cost.
Instead of pursuing it, he asked about the last five years.
Lavi answered without reservations — something he would not have done a year ago, but the Black Order had changed its posture recently, and the organization's work was less concealed than it used to be. He and his partner had been moving constantly: chasing demonic outbreaks, handling what the ordinary forces of the sea couldn't identify as what they were, collecting Devil Fruits along the way for reasons that their superiors had not fully explained to the lower ranks.
The Black Order's casualty rate was something Lavi described without drama, because the drama had worn off some time ago. In his branch, every exorcist except himself and his partner was gone. Pirates, Marines, demons — the causes varied and the result was the same. The organization replenished its numbers from outside recruits now, because the internal pipeline was producing corpses faster than it was producing replacements.
Weevil looked at the black hammer. He had been looking at it, off and on, for the length of this conversation.
"The last time we fought," he said, "I still can't work out what it is. It doesn't feel like a Devil Fruit. It doesn't feel like technology."
"That's because it isn't either," Lavi said. He rested the hammer across his knees. "You know that weapons can absorb Devil Fruits — that there's a mechanism for housing the fruit's power in something that isn't a person."
"I know that," Weevil said.
"This is something different from that." Lavi's fingers ran along the hammer's handle, following a line of inscription that ran from grip to head. "The Black Order takes Devil Fruits and puts them through a process. What comes out isn't a fruit anymore. The thing we call the devil — the consciousness, whatever it is that makes the fruit what it is — is removed. What's left is the core power, purified. It becomes a golden cube with writing on it." He held the hammer out slightly, showing the inscription more clearly. "We call it holy. The Black Order believes there's a god, and this is the protection that god provides to people who are willing to fight on his behalf."
Weevil looked at the inscription.
"Every exorcist gets one," Lavi said. "How well it works depends on the person carrying it. Some people are better matches for some powers than others."
Weevil thought about his broadsword. He had carried it for years, and he had grown into it, but it had no properties beyond its weight and its edge. A weapon that could produce fire on one swing and lightning on the next, that could become small enough to pocket and large enough to take down a wall — he felt the appeal of this in a way that was difficult to fully suppress.
"Is there a version that looks like a sword?" he asked.
Lavi looked at him. Then he laughed.
"I'll put in a request," he said.
The Black Order had surfaced from history's background before. It would surface again, and it would disappear again, and on the far side of each disappearance a different world would be standing. The exorcists were not the ones who decided what that world looked like. They were the ones who made sure there was still a world to decide about.
Lavi thought this was a reasonable division of labor, most of the time.