-Real World-
Totto Land was a celebration with no shortage of things to celebrate.
Every corner of Whole Cake Island hummed with the particular organized joy that Charlotte Linlin's children produced when properly motivated. The wedding tea party was coming, partners needed to be impressed, and the Big Mom Pirates were not in the habit of looking anything less than dominant in front of an audience. Each of the Charlotte siblings performed their duties with the focused efficiency of people who understood that their mother's displeasure was a more immediate problem than the God of the Celestial Dragons.
Im was a concern for the first half of the Grand Line. Business with Celestial Dragons was conducted underground, at careful remove. In the second half of the Grand Line, the World Government's reach had always been limited, and neither the Five Elders nor anyone above them was in a position to change that in the short term. The Big Mom Pirates did not provoke Celestial Dragons. The Celestial Dragons, in turn, had the wisdom to stay out of the Emperors' waters. The arrangement had always worked.
The Im revelation was someone else's problem. There was a wedding to prepare.
-Broadcast-
Outside the Sky Screen, a world held its breath.
What Im would say to the Clown — whether the God of the Celestial Dragons could maintain the weight of his title when faced with a madman who had walked in uninvited and seemed completely unimpressed — was the only question anyone with access to the Sky Screen cared about. Eight hundred years of accumulated existence against a lunatic in face paint who had survived things that should not have been survivable. The Sky Screen continued without preamble.
In the throne room beneath the Empty Throne, the Five Elders rose.
They had been kneeling. Now they stood — five old men whose faces carried the particular blankness of creatures that had lived so long that the concept of individual life had ceased to register as meaningful. They were not beings whose hatred manifested as anger. What filled their eyes when they looked at Buggy was something quieter and more final: indifference to life, the kind that exists only at the far end of centuries. They were not radiating killing intent. They simply had no particular objection to his death.
The fact that Buggy was still standing in this room was, itself, a mistake — and the Five Elders knew whose mistake it was.
Lord Im had emerged from the Flower Palace and come to meet this intruder himself. That should never have been allowed to happen. If the Five Elders had moved to stop Buggy's advance before he reached the throne room, the scene unfolding beneath the Empty Throne would not exist. They had hesitated, afraid to act without explicit instructions. The consequence of that hesitation was standing in front of them with a grin on his face.
Every one of the five old men was suppressing the impulse to simply transform and tear Buggy apart where he stood. But Lord Im had not given the order. And so they waited.
Im looked down.
He observed the Clown — this new Emperor of the Sea, this latest rotation in an eight-hundred-year sequence of pirates who had called themselves kings of something and eventually returned to dust. The Yonko title had passed through so many hands. Confident men, powerful men, men who had looked at the sea and believed they understood it. Where were they now? Illness. Battle. Time. Not one of them had been qualified to sit at the table where real decisions were made. They had always been too short-lived, too narrowly focused on the waters directly in front of them.
Buggy was the first Emperor of the Sea to reach this room. That, Im acknowledged, was worth noting.
"Buggy." His voice had the texture of something worn smooth by too many years, neither old nor young, neither warm nor cold. "I see that you came to the Holy Land ally to find me. Is the title of Pirate King not enough for you? Or have you come to take my seat?"
He tapped the arm of the Empty Throne with one finger.
He did not know. Madmen did not reduce to predictable motivations. The clown in front of him could not be mapped onto any model Im had developed over eight centuries of studying what drove human beings.
As he spoke, the shadow behind him began to move.
It did not behave like a shadow. It spread outward from Im's figure as if it had been waiting for permission, twisting and expanding along the floor and walls until it had formed a vortex — a black spiral so deep it seemed to swallow the light that reached it. Low sounds rose from within it, dense and layered, the pressure of something enormous pressing against the inside of a confined space. Im's red eyes remained still and patient above it all, watching his subject from above with the attention of a collector examining something he had not yet decided to keep.
An ordinary person in this room would not have lasted until the shadow finished forming. The mind would have surrendered on its own, overwhelmed before a single exchange could occur.
Buggy was not an ordinary person.
The smile on his face deepened. Every layer of truth he stripped away from the world, every glimpse into what actually sat at the center of things — it lit him up rather than diminishing him. A madman's vitality fed on exactly this.
"This world has always been too boring for my tastes." His voice was easy, almost conversational — the voice of a man speaking to an equal across a table rather than looking up at a figure on a throne. "I've had to make my own entertainment. I should thank Doflamingo for his contribution, by the way — if he hadn't done what he did, I'd probably still be living inside the bubble you've been weaving for everyone. It's a very well-made bubble. I'll give you that."
He could not match Im's presence in a direct contest. The Conqueror's Haki in his body was not decorative, but it was not the accumulated weight of eight uninterrupted centuries either. It didn't matter. The Clown did not need to win a contest of pressure to make his point.
Buggy released it anyway.
The Conqueror's Haki came out like a tide — not the gradual expansion of a man testing his limits, but a sudden wave that filled the room all at once, and with it came the black lightning. It crackled between the manifestations of his will like living things, each bolt tearing a small scar through the air before dissipating and forming again. The sound was continuous — not thunder exactly, but something closer to the sound a world makes when it decides to take a person seriously.
The Five Elders felt it first. These were not weak men. But power on this scale, pressing against them without warning in an enclosed space, produced an involuntary physical response — they stepped back, one by one, the color leaving their faces. They understood the calculation immediately, even if they could not explain why a pirate emperor was releasing Conqueror's Haki that exceeded their own. Their confusion showed.
The two forces met in the center of the room — Im's shadow, curling outward with the patient destructive weight of something that had been accumulating for longer than most civilizations had existed, and Buggy's black-lightning tide, sharp and immediate and entirely unconcerned with whether it was supposed to be there. The intersection point was everywhere and nowhere in particular. Ornaments flew from every surface. The red carpet — the sort of fabric that existed ally to communicate that ordinary people were not meant to stand on it — began tearing from the middle outward, piece by piece, until it was simply garbage on the floor of a very important room.
Neither force gave ground.
Then, at the same moment, both withdrew.
The room settled. The debris stayed where it had landed.
Im studied the madman under his throne for a long moment. The calibration had been made. Whatever Buggy was — however he had gotten here, whatever had made him what he was — he was qualified to continue this conversation.
"You have now met me face to face. You brought chaos to the Holy Land. Many of the Celestial Dragons died in that chaos." Im's voice did not change in register, but something in it sharpened. "Give me a reason. A reason I should not end this here."
He had not yet decided to kill Buggy. He wanted to know first. Did the Clown intend to overthrow the World Government? To kill the Celestial Dragons and install himself in their place? To do something Im had not thought of in eight hundred years and would therefore actually find interesting?
Whether Buggy carried a D or belonged to the Will of D — the World Government's records on this man were incomplete. The Five Elders had been complacent for too long. The Celestial Dragons had lived in peace and comfort until the edges of their reality had softened. Their agents had maintained the appearance of loyalty more thoroughly than the substance of it. The World Government, as it had been allowed to operate in recent decades, was not the structure Im had designed. Its foundation was no longer what it had been.
Buggy, standing under the Empty Throne, was entirely capable of being the one who moved first.
Before he could answer, the space behind him folded.
It was precise — a seam opening in the air as if something had known exactly where to put it. Through that seam, an unexpected woman arrived.
Tobi had sent her.