-Real World-
The Red Hair Pirates were on patrol.
This was routine — sweeping their own waters, making their presence felt among whatever villains had gotten comfortable in the territories Shanks was expected to keep quiet. A show of force here, an elimination there. The kind of work that kept a Yonko's name meaningful rather than merely famous.
Uta had bought a newspaper at the last port.
She read it standing on the deck, the wind pulling at her two-tone hair, her expression changing by degrees as she worked through the pages. Luffy and his crew had nearly been destroyed in the Kingdom of Arabasta. Every member had survived — that much was confirmed — but the toll they'd taken was severe. Lost half their life, the reporter had written, which was the kind of language that a newspaper used when the truth was bad and the s were uncertain.
The article offered no explanation for why Crocodile had let them go. To anyone who knew Baroque Works, that gap in the reporting was its own kind of answer. The organization had spent the first half of the Grand Line establishing itself as something rookies did not walk away from. There was a trick involved. There had to be.
"The paper says Luffy and the others are badly hurt." Uta handed it to her father. "I want to go see him."
Shanks took the newspaper and read it with the careful attention of someone who was reading between every line as much as through them.
His brow creased.
The Arabasta news was bad enough. But beneath it, worse: the great demon Naraku had appeared in the flesh and had personally dismantled the Whitebeard Pirates' expedition team. Marco and Vista — Whitebeard's most capable sons — had been present. The fact that they were reporting back at all spoke to how the encounter had ended, and not in their favor.
Worse still: Marshall D. Teach was alive. He had captured the Pirate King's son — Portgas D. Ace, Whitebeard's most beloved godson, now a prisoner of the Marines. And Teach's connection to the newly surfaced Naraku was not an accident or coincidence. The shape of what was being assembled was beginning to show its edges.
The first half of the Grand Line was becoming dangerous in the way the second half had always been. Shanks set the paper down.
"Uta." His voice was measured. "I don't think you need to worry too much about Luffy. He escaped Crocodile's grip, and if I had to guess—" He glanced up at the sky, in the direction of the distant invisible Sky Screen, at the clown who still floated there in the broadcast. "—he had help. Someone put pressure on Baroque Works from above. They wouldn't have let him walk otherwise."
Uta's jaw set with the particular stubbornness she had inherited from no one Shanks could name. He continued before she could argue.
"This isn't the time for you to leave my side."
The Sky Screen had exposed the Uta Uta no Mi (Song-Song Fruit) completely — its mechanics, its range, its ceiling. Anyone with ambition and sufficient strength now knew exactly what Uta carried. The protection of being unknown was gone. Staying near a Yonko was the only security that substituted for it.
Uta understood this, even if she didn't want to agree.
What occupied more of Shanks' attention, in the silence that followed, was Im.
He had known — not precisely, but in the way that someone with access to old information and older connections sometimes knows the shape of a thing before its name — that something existed above the Five Elders. Saint Figarland Garling had hinted at it, obliquely and more than once, in the way powerful men sometimes let knowledge escape them as a gesture of calculated trust. Shanks had filed it and waited.
Now the Sky Screen had confirmed it, and confirmed it completely.
Even he, with the emotional control that had made him one of the most dangerous men alive to read at a negotiating table, had felt the color leave his face when he saw Im seated on the Empty Throne. As a descendant of the Twenty Kings, he understood that position in a way most of the world did not. The Empty Throne was not supposed to have someone in it. That was the entire foundation of the agreement the founders had made. Someone had been sitting there for eight hundred years, and the agreement had been theater from the first day.
Shanks had very good control over his expressions. He had not had good enough control for that.
He found himself admiring Buggy — a feeling he still wasn't entirely comfortable with. His old crewmate had stood in that room and faced the God of the Celestial Dragons without flinching, without his expression shifting into anything that could be read as weakness. Whatever Buggy had become in the years since the Roger Pirates disbanded, it was something Shanks did not fully recognize and was no longer willing to dismiss.
Garling, too. The God's Knights' commander must have known about Im. He was either another layer of Im's control apparatus — a tool for managing the Celestial Dragons from within — or he was something more complicated. Shanks had not decided which.
"The sea is getting hotter by the day." He touched Uta's hair, the gesture easy and habitual in the way that things became when a reconciliation had made them precious. "We know things now that we probably weren't meant to know. All we can do is watch."
He didn't say what he was watching for. He thought Uta probably understood.
His own ambitions — the ones he'd carried since the Grand Line first opened up its possibilities to a young man on the Roger Pirates — had grown quieter lately. There was a softness beside him that had no place in the calculations of men who wanted to rule the sea. He felt, as he had for a while now, that the moment wasn't right. He was waiting. He had been waiting, in his own way, for Luffy.
Buggy, he suspected, was doing the same thing. And if Buggy was waiting for Luffy with motives that weren't entirely transparent, Shanks would not be surprised. The clown who had once spent every meal complaining across from him on the Oro Jackson was not the same person as the one standing before the Empty Throne. The distance between those two images was wider than Shanks wanted to think about.
On Onigashima, Kaido was listening.
Doflamingo — Heavenly Yaksha — stood before him and reported. He had surrendered his Celestial Dragon identity completely in the years since joining the Beasts Pirates, and Kaido had found him useful precisely because of it. A man who had given up everything he was born into to follow someone stronger had a different kind of loyalty than a man who still had other options.
The report was about Im. About everything Doflamingo had pieced together from the Sky Screen and his own prior knowledge.
"The Ope Ope no Mi," Kaido said, when Doflamingo finished. He turned the information over, examining it from different angles with the patience of someone who had survived long enough to give dangerous ideas their proper weight. "A magical thing. The Immortality Operation. Tempting, certainly — but there are always side effects."
He studied the image burned into his memory: black cloth over everything, red circular eyes, a voice that had worn smooth over centuries. Something about the presentation had struck him as significant. Not the power — the appearance. A man who had lived eight hundred years uninterrupted and looked like that had paid something for it, and the payment showed.
Doflamingo noted that his younger brother had originally been intended to consume the Ope Ope no Mi. That hadn't happened — Rosinante had been a Marine spy, and the fruit had ended up with Trafalgar Law. Somewhere on the sea, the Heart Pirates were hiding, and finding them was not simple.
Kaido accepted this without particular reaction. Plans involving younger brothers had a historical tendency to fail.
What stayed with him longer were the titles the Sky Screen had introduced. The God of the Celestial Dragons — Im. The God of the Ninja — Uchiha Madara. The Sun God — Joyboy. The Demigod —Ornn. These were the names that had accumulated weight in the world, each representing something that existed outside of ordinary human scale.
The Sun God Kaido had a ring to it. Better than Joyboy, if he was honest. Power, as a concept, was not diminished by calling it divine — it was made louder. The idea pleased him more than it probably should have.
He did not say this aloud. He didn't need to. Doflamingo, who had learned to read Kaido's silences during their years together, watched his captain's faint satisfaction with the practiced neutrality of a man who knew better than to comment.
On the Moby Dick, Edward Newgate was receiving an IV drip.
The news was piling up in ways that even a man of his constitution could only absorb so much of at once. His godson Ace was a prisoner of the Marine. Kozuki Momonosuke — effectively a nephew, the son of Oden — was on Whole Cake Island preparing to become the next husband of Charlotte Linlin, a fate that Whitebeard's dignity would not allow him to ignore. And then there was the matter of Edward Weevil, which Whitebeard had already addressed clearly and intended not to address again.
"Dad," said Diamond Jozu, apparently unable to help himself despite the room's general awareness that this was a bad idea, "is this Weevil really yours? The beard is similar to what you looked like when you were younger."
Edward Newgate looked at Diamond Jozu with the expression of a man who had just watched his most loyal subordinate prove that even intelligence and competence had their limits.
He had already told them. He had been explicit. Edward Weevil had no connection to him. If he had ever had real family — real blood — he would not have spent his years assembling a crew of godsons because a family of love without blood was the only kind available to him. That longing didn't come from a man who had descendants waiting somewhere.
He said nothing. The IV drip continued.
Marco had called hours ago, along with Vista. Both were alive, both injured, neither arrested. The full weight of what Naraku actually was — the gap between what the Sky Screen showed and what the man was capable of in person — had come through in Marco's voice more than his words. The two of them together hadn't been able to breach the barrier. Without the intervention of the female Claymore fighter, they would not have left Arabasta at all.
Whitebeard did not blame them. There were opponents you could not overcome by trying harder, and Naraku was one of them. He told his sons to find a place to hide and recover. He told them the Marine Admirals wouldn't make a rash move against Ace while Im's revelation was still reshaping the world's priorities. Ace's life was not in immediate danger.
His hand tightened slightly on the edge of the bed.
The Whitebeard Pirates did not have the capacity to fight in two places at once — not right now, not with so many of his strongest sons deployed or wounded. Ace would have to wait. Momonosuke could not. Oden's son was alive, and Whitebeard intended to keep him that way.
He ordered the course set for Whole Cake Island.
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