—Broadcast—
The old man possessed neither the heart to become a god nor the will to seize divine authority—yet he'd stolen it nonetheless. If Vegapunk truly desired, he could transform every intelligent creature in the world into his personal slaves with a single broadcast. Reshape global consciousness according to his specifications. Become the singular mind puppeting seven billion bodies.
But he wouldn't. Couldn't. As a former recipient of the World Government's Peace Prize—that hollow accolade awarded to scientists who served the Celestial Dragons' interests—he remained fundamentally mortal. Burdened with conscience. Shackled by ethics that more ruthless men would call pathetic weakness.
Victor had anticipated this exact scenario before even departing for Egghead Island. A man like Vegapunk would never surrender the Anti-Life Equation willingly. He'd take extreme measures, embrace martyrdom, choose death over collaboration with those he deemed unworthy.
Which meant the mechanical lifeform had exactly one viable option for what came next.
"As long as you're brought back to the Illuminati," Victor stated, his synthesized voice carrying absolute certainty, "even if you've destroyed your memory, your secrets will never remain hidden. Don't bother trying to outsmart us here, Doctor."
The old man—tongue protruding obscenely from his mouth, blood from Shaka's execution still drying on his weathered face—understood the implications immediately. He couldn't allow himself to be captured. Not by someone who commanded Victor's level of technological sophistication.
The mechanical lifeform had already demonstrated capabilities that suggested multiple pathways to memory extraction. Neural scanning. Quantum consciousness mapping. Perhaps even techniques that bypassed organic memory storage entirely, reconstructing information from synaptic residue or electromagnetic echoes.
If captured, Vegapunk would become a specimen. Unable to live, unable to die, forced to watch as his life's most dangerous creation was deployed against the world he'd tried to save. He'd become history's greatest villain despite his best intentions.
Better to end it now. Quick. Clean. Final.
Vegapunk's hand moved decisively toward the concealed suicide switch, ignoring everything else—Sentomaru's broken body bleeding out nearby, Lilith's desperate shouts, York's predatory anticipation. His entire focus narrowed to that single action: activate the toxin release, accept oblivion, bury the Anti-Life Equation forever.
But he'd underestimated Victor's tactical preparation.
"Seraphim Units!" Vegapunk's voice cracked like a whip through the laboratory's emergency communication system, utilizing his creator's authority override. "Emergency Protocol Omega! Engage hostile entities with extreme prejudice! Self-destruct authorization: approved!"
The response was immediate.
S-Hawk, S-Shark, S-Boa, and S-Bear—still pinned beneath Victor's purple gravity field, their small bodies grinding against laboratory tiles under hundredfold weight—suddenly began to glow. Red light pulsed from beneath their brown skin, veins standing out in sharp relief as the green blood (synthetic Lunarian fuel) within their artificial circulatory systems began to boil.
The child-warriors' eyes widened in synchronized determination. They knew what this order meant. Understood they were about to die.
But they were programmed for absolute obedience to their creator.
From the auxiliary corridors, two more Seraphim burst into view—reinforcements Vegapunk had kept in reserve. S-Flamingo, based on Donquixote Doflamingo's genetics, moved with his progenitor's distinctive arrogant swagger despite his child-sized frame. His pink feathered coat billowed as invisible strings shot from his fingertips. S-Gecko, bearing Gecko Moria's distinctive features compressed into a nine-year-old's body, raised shadow-covered hands as darkness peeled from the walls themselves.
S-Flamingo's high-pitched voice rang out as razor-wire threads lashed toward Victor's mechanical form.
S-Gecko's shadows coalesced into solid constructs, forming barriers and grasping tendrils.
The four gravity-pinned Seraphim continued their countdown. Internal temperatures rising. Green blood approaching critical boiling point. Five seconds to detonation. Four. Three.
Their combined explosion would vaporize everything within a hundred-meter radius. The experimental floor would collapse entirely. Victor might survive—his mechanical body could potentially withstand the blast—but York would be obliterated, and any chance of extracting Vegapunk alive would vanish in the fireball.
It was a suicide gambit, children weaponized for a final desperate stand.
But Victor was no fool.
The mechanical staff in his right hand pulsed with energy, Hextech crystal within its core flooding circuits with impossible power. Electrical threads—hair-thin filaments of pure lightning—began peeling from the weapon's surface, crackling through the air like living things.
"Insufficient." Victor's assessment was clinical, emotionless. "Your determination is admirable. Your execution is inadequate."
Six spherical constructs separated from the mechanical staff, each one roughly the size of a human eyeball. They didn't look particularly dangerous—just balls of condensed blue-white electricity, hovering weightlessly in the charged atmosphere.
Ball lightning. Weaponized.
The spheres accelerated to velocities invisible to unenhanced human perception, crossing the distance to their targets in microseconds. S-Flamingo's strings disintegrated on contact. S-Gecko's shadows evaporated like morning mist. The four prone Seraphim—still counting down their self-destruction sequence—suddenly found the ball lightning spheres pressed against their small bodies.
Then came the light.
Pure blue-white radiance erupted from each contact point. Not heat. Not force. Something far worse.
Molecular decomposition.
The Seraphim's bodies began to disintegrate at the fundamental structural level. Lunarian durability meant nothing against attacks that operated at quantum scales. Their enhanced cellular matrices—designed to withstand Admiral-class punishment—simply came apart. Atoms separated from molecules. Molecules fragmented into constituent components. Matter itself ceased to maintain coherent form.
S-Hawk's blade-covered arms crumbled into silvery dust. S-Shark's powerful musculature dissolved like smoke. S-Boa's graceful features blurred, then vanished. S-Bear's distinctive paw-pads scattered into geometric patterns of dispersing particles.
Whether their consciousnesses—those fragile sparks of emerging personality these child-weapons had begun developing—survived in some ethereal form within the ionosphere was a question requiring scientific verification.
Victor filed it away for future research.
The entire process took less than three seconds. Six first-generation Seraphim—each one worth billions of Beli, years of research, irreplaceable genetic material—reduced to invisible particulate matter suspended in laboratory air.
S-Flamingo and S-Gecko lasted slightly longer, their Devil Fruit abilities providing marginal resistance. But marginal was insufficient. Their strings and shadows couldn't block decomposition at the atomic level. They disintegrated just like their siblings, leaving only fading electrical afterglow.
Silence crashed back into the experimental floor like a physical weight.
Victor and York stepped forward, their footsteps echoing in the sudden absence of combat. They ignored Lilith entirely—the female satellite had retreated behind cover, her combat capabilities too limited to pose any threat. Sentomaru's unconscious form required no attention; he'd bleed out eventually if left untreated.
Their focus remained singular: Vegapunk himself, fleeing deeper into the labyrinthine experimental complex.
"Vegapunk," Victor's voice projected through the facility's speaker system, calm and inexorable, "I don't have time for cat-and-mouse games anymore. It's time to leave."
Outside Egghead Island's defensive perimeter, the surveillance robots Ultron had positioned as early warning sensors were being systematically destroyed. The approaching aerial force—biological signatures riding thermal currents with military precision—eliminated each drone with casual efficiency.
Golden griffins. Royal Guard cavalry. The New Marine's elite rapid response force.
Ultron's quantum consciousness registered the tactical development and immediately transmitted priority alerts to his partner: Extraction window closing. High-probability Admiral-class combat imminent. Recommend immediate withdrawal.
Victor acknowledged the warning with a mental command, then activated his trump card.
With the Mechanical Pioneer as the epicenter, a gravitational distortion field expanded outward in a perfect sphere. One kilometer radius. Ten times standard gravity—his weakest setting, calibrated specifically to avoid crushing Vegapunk's elderly frame into pulp.
The effect was immediate and absolute. Throughout the experimental floor, unsecured equipment crashed to the ground. Structural supports groaned under multiplied stress. And Vegapunk himself—frantically limping toward a hidden escape tunnel—found his legs buckling as his own body weight increased tenfold.
The old man collapsed face-first onto metal decking, his elongated tongue slapping against floor tiles with undignified force. He tried to push himself up. Failed. His arms trembled uselessly under the gravitational burden.
Victor closed the distance in four casual strides, his mechanical body utterly unaffected by the field his own systems generated. He stared down at the world's greatest scientist—pinned like an insect, helpless and gasping—and felt something approaching satisfaction.
This was the legendary Dr. Vegapunk. The man whose name inspired awe across the globe. The genius who'd reshaped warfare itself.
Reduced to a wheezing pile of lab coat and desperation.
Victor genuinely wished he could photograph this moment and send it to Morgans. The headline would be magnificent.
"York," the mechanical lifeform commanded, "I'm deploying the Hextech Flying Gate for emergency extraction. Restrain him. Ensure he can't interfere with the teleportation sequence."
York—equipped with the anti-gravity device Victor had provided earlier, allowing her to move freely within the distortion field—approached the original with barely concealed glee. The traitor satellite carried rope she'd scavenged from supply crates, binding Vegapunk's wrists and ankles with vicious efficiency.
Then, for good measure, she produced a boot from somewhere and stuffed it into the old man's mouth. The worn leather filled his oral cavity completely, tongue pinned awkwardly against teeth, eliminating any possibility of verbal commands or last-minute revelations.
Vegapunk's muffled protests emerged as pathetic whimpering. His eyes watered—from humiliation, from fury, from the crushing weight of failure.
This distinguished scientist, this recipient of international accolades, this guest of honor in a hundred nations... reduced to having dirty footwear jammed into his mouth like a common criminal.
And his cursed Devil Fruit-extended tongue made biting through it to commit suicide absolutely impossible. The muscle was simply too long, too flexible, positioned wrong for self-inflicted fatal damage.
He was trapped. Helpless. At the mercy of people who possessed no mercy whatsoever.
The Hextech Flying Gate was Victor's personal modification—a miniaturized version of the legendary transportation network that once connected ancient civilizations. The original gates had been massive archways spanning hundreds of meters, capable of instantaneous travel across continental distances.
Victor's version was portable. Wearable. Concealable within his mechanical chassis during normal operations, deployable within seconds when escape became necessary.
However, the compact design imposed limitations. The deployment sequence required precisely one minute—sixty seconds to unfold the platform, establish the quantum entanglement corridor, align the Hextech crystal's resonance frequency, and lock destination coordinates.
If interrupted during this preparation phase, the entire process would reset. Safety protocols demanded absolute stability; otherwise, even Victor's reinforced mechanical body would be crushed into exotic matter during the transdimensional jump.
A prototype platform rose from panels in Victor's lower chassis, extending outward like a mechanical flower blooming. He and York—still restraining the bound Vegapunk—positioned themselves at the platform's center. Above them, visible lines of brilliant blue energy began sketching mathematical formulae directly into the air.
Geometric patterns spiraled outward. Equations describing spatial folding, quantum tunneling, probability manipulation rendered in luminous script. From a distance, they appeared covered by something resembling an arcane magic circle from ancient legends.
The Hextech Flying Gate didn't merely look non-technological. It fundamentally was non-technological in any conventional sense. This was science so advanced it became indistinguishable from sorcery.
"Can you make this faster?" York's voice carried a tremor she couldn't quite suppress, sweat beading across her forehead despite the controlled climate. "I have a very bad feeling about—"
Her words cut off as alarms screamed through the facility.
Victor's sensors had already detected the intrusion. He'd deployed the experimental floor's defensive laser barrier—ironically using Vegapunk's own security system against external threats. The multi-layered energy shields crackled to full power, forming an impenetrable wall of coherent light designed to vaporize anything attempting unauthorized entry.
BOOM.
The explosion echoed like artillery fire, a mushroom cloud of superheated plasma rising where the barrier met resistance. Someone outside was attempting to breach through brute force, hammering the defenses with devastating power.
For a moment, Victor calculated success probability. The laser barrier had withstood direct attacks from Vice-Admiral-class combatants during testing. Even Admiral-class fighters would require sustained assault to—
Then the sensors showed something impossible.
A human silhouette. Walking through the barrier as if it didn't exist. The defensive lasers bent around the figure, repelled like rain sliding off oiled cloth.
"Shit." The profanity emerged from York's lips as recognition crystallized. Her earlier arrogance evaporated completely, replaced by raw animal fear. "That's not—he can't already be—"
Because she could see the cloak now. The distinctive white coat with "JUSTICE" emblazoned across the back in bold kanji. The garment billowed dramatically in the smoke and heated air, its wearer completely unharmed by the defensive systems that should have cremated any intruder.
Victor's optical sensors focused, enhancing the image, analyzing the threat profile.
The figure was middle-aged, powerfully built, with a face marked by old scars that spoke of countless battles survived. But his most distinctive feature was the substance dripping from his mouth—molten rock, glowing cherry-red in the dim light, releasing sulfurous gas that made the air shimmer.
"Where," the man's voice rumbled like tectonic plates grinding together, each word carrying barely restrained volcanic fury, "do you think you're taking Vegapunk, invaders?"
Admiral Sakazuki.