-Broadcast-
The woman who stepped through the folded space had long, wavy hair the color of pale seafoam, a figure that belonged in a palace, and eyes that belonged nowhere at all.
She was present. Her chest rose and fell with the rhythm of someone alive. But the light behind her eyes had gone somewhere else entirely, trapped in whatever illusion Tobi had woven around her consciousness — a beautiful living shell, breathing and standing and utterly absent. Without Tobi to remove the construct, she would remain like this indefinitely: preserved, hollow, aging slowly until there was nothing left to preserve.
Buggy took her chin in one hand and tilted her face upward.
He angled it toward the Empty Throne with the deliberate patience of a man presenting a painting he knew would land.
"You know this face, Im." His voice carried the easy confidence of someone who had done his research. "You've had her newspaper on your floor. I'd say you've been thinking about this one for a while. Anything to say?"
The Five Elders identified her immediately. Princess Nefertari Vivi of Arabasta — the girl who had disappeared when her kingdom fell. The reports had placed her dead, caught in the chaos Naraku had left behind. The reports had been wrong.
Their confusion was brief. It gave way quickly to a more uncomfortable question. They were Lord Im's instruments, and they did not share all of his knowledge. They knew one thing with certainty: there was a newspaper featuring Princess Vivi in Lord Im's private chambers. They had drawn the only conclusion that seemed to fit. They had not drawn the right one.
On the Empty Throne, something changed.
Im had been still since Buggy arrived — the stillness of something that had learned, over centuries, that movement was a form of investment, and that most things were not worth investing in. He had assessed the Clown, endured the Conqueror's Haki contest, and remained composed throughout.
He was not composed now.
The shift was small. A slight tension moving through the black cloth. Both hands closing, unhurried but unmistakably deliberate, into fists. His breathing, which had not been perceptible before, was audible. The air in the room changed first — a pressure settling over everything like weather, invisible but physical in the way it found skin and pressed.
The shadow behind the Empty Throne had been growing since the fight began. Now it accelerated. It spread outward from Im's silhouette in all directions — across the floor, up the walls, reaching the ceiling before anyone in the room had fully registered it happening. The darkness that came off it was absolute. Not a trick of the light. A presence.
The Five Elders had served Lord Im for the entirety of their long existence. They had never seen him like this.
It is just a woman. The thought passed through each of them and found no traction. Whatever Vivi's face meant to the God of the Celestial Dragons, it was not something that fit inside the category of just a woman.
They did not ask. Fear of learning things they were not permitted to know was older, in each of them, than almost any other habit.
"Buggy." Im's voice was still controlled, but the smoothness in it had developed an edge. "Remove the mental binding on her. Hand her to me. The indiscretions you committed today — the Marines, the chaos — I will set those aside."
The shadow extended into the room's corners, filling the spaces between columns, pooling behind doorways. It began moving with intention — not the passive spread of darkness but a slow encirclement, sliding around Buggy's position from every direction, cutting off the sightlines to every exit.
Buggy's Observation Haki registered all of it.
He was not panicked. The corners of his mouth moved in the direction they tended to move when things were going exactly as badly as he had planned for them to go.
"Im." He let the name sit for a moment. Then: "Actually, I should use the full name. Nerona Im. That's the correct form, isn't it?"
The Five Elders stopped breathing.
"Princess Vivi and her ancestor — Nefertari D. Lily — they look exactly alike. I mean exactly. The kind of resemblance that doesn't happen by accident."
The topic had now crossed into territory from which there was no orderly withdrawal. Every person in this room who was not Buggy or Im understood, simultaneously, that they had just heard something they were not supposed to hear — and that having heard it made them a potential problem to be managed. The Five Elders had spent centuries learning to survive the information gradient between themselves and Lord Im. This moment sat outside any of those calculations.
There was only one practical response.
Saint Marcus Mars moved first. "Buggy." The composure in his voice was the practiced composure of something very old and very dangerous keeping itself disciplined. "Hand over Princess Vivi. And leave your life here as well."
Saint Jaygarcia Saturn, almost to himself: "A pity the Holy Land isn't better positioned for this. We could have ended it faster."
Saint Nasujuro: "The woman becomes ours when he falls."
Saint Shepherd Ju Peter: "We should have moved before he started talking."
Saint Topman Warcury: "Before Lord Im's patience runs out entirely — let us finish this cleanly."
The black mist was already rising from the Five Elders' bodies before the last word left Warcury's mouth.
It moved like smoke but behaved like something alive — climbing their outlines, consuming the shapes of old men, producing shapes that were not old men at all. The outlines grew. The human proportions gave way to something else. Something older.
Buggy gathered Vivi against him and moved toward the exit.
He was not going to hand the God of the Celestial Dragons a bargaining chip he had carried all the way to the center of the world. Whatever sacrifice was eventually going to be demanded for this audience, the Joker Pirates' style did not include giving anything away before the price had been properly extracted.
The Houki emerged from Warcury's mist first.
It was enormous — a boar of impossible proportions, body wrapped in black auspicious clouds that moved with it like a personal atmosphere. Its mouth opened wide enough to matter. Four heavy tusks curved from the lower jaw. The sound that came out of it filled the throne room and then filled everything beyond the throne room. It was not a roar in the way that animals roar. It was something that operated at the same frequency as authority — a sound that entered the nervous system and gave instructions.
Every glass surface in the Holy Land shattered at once.
Buggy's body went rigid. His Armament Haki rose instinctively, coating his frame in the dense black sheen, and between that and the physical conditioning of a man who had survived considerably more than this, he stayed upright. He stayed upright. It required most of his immediate attention.
The weaker residents of the Holy Land dropped where they stood — Celestial Dragons who had never been required to develop the kind of physical resilience that the Grand Line demanded, toppling sideways mid-step with foam at their mouths. Some of them did not stir afterward.
"Slightly unfair," Buggy said, when his jaw unclenched enough to permit it. His hearing was ringing. "My eardrums very nearly did not survive that."
Saint Nasujuro arrived from the left.
The transformation had produced a centaur — the lower half a skeleton horse, bone structure fully exposed and moving with the smooth certainty of something that had never needed flesh to function, the upper half maintaining the recognizable shape of the Financial Martial God in the way a photograph maintains a resemblance. The first-generation Kitetsu was already unsheathed. Black auspicious clouds clung to the blade's edge. He came at Buggy in the formal posture of a rider who had never needed to be taught how to use a cavalry charge — because there had never been a time before he already knew.
From directly above, Saint Marcus Mars descended.
The Itsumade form was wrong in the way that mythological creatures are always slightly wrong — bird hands, bird wings, bird talons, all framing a body that ended in scales rather than feathers. Enormous. Fire flickering at the back of its throat, held there by the simple fact that Vivi was in Buggy's arms and fire made no distinction between targets. It angled toward her instead — two huge talons extended, calculating the geometry of a snatch that would require precision rather than brute force.
From below, the ground began to move.
The vibration reached Buggy's feet before his eyes identified the source. His Observation Haki dropped downward — and found Saint Shepherd Ju Peter somewhere under the foundation of Pangaea Castle, a sandworm of impractical size carving through the bedrock with the mouthparts on its head as if the structural integrity of the Holy Land's oldest buildings was someone else's problem. Which, for a demonic entity that had been wearing a human face for centuries, it presumably was.
Saint Jaygarcia Saturn had not yet reached him.
Saturn stood at the room's edge in the Ushioni form — bovine horns arcing from the skull above a body supported by spider legs that moved with an precision that legs born for straight movement had no right to possess. His eyes pulsed with black light. The Conqueror's Haki manifestation around him crackled and spat black lightning in the way that Buggy had produced it earlier, except that Saturn's had the quality of something that had been accumulating for a very long time without release.
Their eyes met across the debris-strewn throne room.
Buggy felt it immediately — a spike of pressure behind his eyes, direct and purposeful, like a blade inserted at an angle he couldn't defend against. His scalp registered the sensation as an emergency. His skull felt like it was being tested from the inside.
He was facing five demons simultaneously. One of them was trying to split his mind open from across the room while the other four closed the distance.
The clown's smile had not diminished. If anything, and for reasons that would have required a very particular kind of mind to explain, it had gotten wider.
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