-Real World-
The Marine was not handling this well.
That was not a criticism — there was no handling this well. But the Marine was the institution most structurally entangled with the World Government, and the Sky Screen had just informed every sailor in every post on every sea that behind the institution they worked for, behind the Five Elders who gave the orders the Fleet Admiral transmitted down the chain, there was something eight hundred years old sitting on a throne that was supposed to be empty.
The guards on duty were supposed to be watching for ships. They were watching the Sky Screen.
Smoker walked past them without saying a word about it. His adjutant Tashigi kept pace behind him — she was not panicking, which he appreciated, but she had clearly been waiting since the broadcast to find someone to process this with aloud. He understood the impulse. He had it himself.
He found a corner of the base that was unlikely to produce an audience and stopped. He produced two cigars, lit his, and held the second one out.
Tashigi took it without comment.
The smoke settled around them, and Smoker let himself think without managing the output.
"If Im has been alive for eight hundred years," he said, "and the Immortality Operation has been confirmed as real—" He stopped. The math assembled itself without being asked. "What kind of strength does someone accumulate in eight hundred years of not dying?"
It was not a rhetorical question. He was actually trying to estimate.
Tashigi thought of Madara — Uchiha Madara's appearance at the Devil's Triangle, the way he had moved through the Marine's best available forces and left none of them feeling like they had been in a real fight. The Sky Screen called him the God of Ninjas. That title had felt inflated when it was first applied. It felt less inflated after the Devil's Triangle.
If Im carried a parallel title — God of the Celestial Dragons — and had accumulated whatever Madara had accumulated but across eight hundred years rather than the span of a human life—
"It would be worse than Madara," Tashigi said. "Much worse."
Smoker exhaled.
He thought about the future Marine. Twelve admirals. A Fleet Admiral who was twenty-three years old and had built Rome from nothing and designed an entire merit system and apparently knew about Im and had looked at that information and decided not yet. Artoria Pendragon was not a woman who missed things. If she had seen the ceiling above the World Government's ceiling and concluded that direct confrontation was not the current move, Smoker found it difficult to argue with her.
The Pirate Alliance's assault on the admirals had generated a great deal of noise and no permanent damage. No admirals killed. The Marine's top-tier combat power was intact. Whatever that assault had been meant to accomplish beyond the noise, it had not accomplished it.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe the noise was all anyone was permitted to make right now.
In the Marine Headquarters war room, the senior officers had been dismissed. Sengoku had sent them back to their departments — go manage your people, wait for more from the Sky Screen, there is nothing to decide today that cannot be decided better once more information arrives. They had gone.
Three people remained.
Sengoku at his desk, papers in front of him. Garp in the seat he occupied at these meetings, the one slightly too small for him that he had never complained about. Tsuru, standing, doing something with her hands that looked like idle movement and was not.
The current admiral situation: Aramaki and Sakazuki were already at sea, bound for Whole Cake Island on a matter that had been arranged before today's broadcast. Borsalino was en route to Arabasta to collect Ace. That left Kuzan at Marine Headquarters under standing orders to stay — protect the base, do not respond to peripheral incidents, the Sabaody Archipelago could manage its own problems for now, some Celestial Dragons dying was an acceptable cost of concentration.
Five admirals for a Marine that had spent decades operating with three. Still thin against whatever Im's actual operational capacity was, but thinner was not the conversation they were having today.
Sengoku reached for the stack of intelligence documents he had been sorting.
His hands were shaking.
He was not aware of it until the documents left his grip — the entire stack, scattered — and then he looked at his hands and watched them shake and could not make them stop. Garp was on his feet immediately. Sengoku waved him back with one of those same trembling hands, which did not produce the effect of authority it was meant to, because the hand was still visibly shaking.
He crouched and picked up the documents one by one.
It took longer than it should have.
He had been running the Marine's strategic direction for decades. He had navigated Gold Roger's execution and the era it opened. He had navigated Whitebeard's presence at the top of the sea's power structure. He had navigated the Sky Screen's arrival and everything it had done to the world's information landscape. Every one of those things had been manageable because they were large but finite — problems with knowable edges.
Im had no knowable edge. Im was the context in which every other problem had ever occurred, and Im had been that context for eight hundred years, and Sengoku had been steering his ship without knowing the iceberg was there.
Garp watched his best friend pick up documents with shaking hands and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that Sengoku would want to hear right now, and saying nothing was a form of respect.
"We cannot give Artoria up," Tsuru said.
Her voice was even. She had made her decision before she spoke, and she spoke after the documents were back on the desk and Sengoku's hands had stilled enough for the conversation to begin.
"If Sengoku surrenders her to Im as a gesture of accommodation, we lose the one person capable of building what comes after. Im will not honor whatever terms are offered. There is no version of that exchange that ends well for the Marine."
Sengoku looked at her.
"You've seen something," he said.
"I've thought about it carefully," Tsuru said. "I've also seen Kizaru's future, which is context." She looked at both of them. "The future without war that most people at sea want — someone has to build the structure for it. Artoria is that structure. The fire that makes her possible needs protecting before it can grow large enough to protect itself."
Garp folded his hands. He did not disagree.
The three of them sat with the weight of a world that was larger than they had known it was, and considered what it meant to keep moving forward anyway.
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