-Real World-
The battle on Nine Snake Island had reached its terrible conclusion on the Sky Screen, but the reverberations in Mary Geoise had only just begun.
Boa Hancock pushed open the conference room door without a word.
The corridor beyond stretched in both directions, lined with World Government agents standing at parade-ground attention. Their white masks and immaculate uniforms projected the same serene authority as always — that particular flavor of superiority that only men who had spent decades as attack dogs for the Celestial Dragons could manage to cultivate. When they saw the Empress emerge alone, several moved to intercept her.
"Ms. Boa Hancock." The lead agent stepped forward, his tone carrying the casual condescension of a man who had never once considered that the person he was addressing might be more dangerous than anything he carried. "You cannot leave without the order of the Five Elders."
Another took a step closer. "Wait. I'm speaking to you. Leave these premises without authorization, and you will face severe—"
The voice cut off.
No one struck him. No one moved.
The corridor fell silent.
The only sound that remained was the measured click of high heels on polished marble — steady, unhurried, utterly indifferent — growing fainter with each step, until even that faded into the vast quiet of Pangaea Castle's upper halls.
The agents who had spoken were still standing in place. Every last one of them. Their colleagues who had rushed to block her path were frozen mid-stride. Their superiors who had shouted from the far end of the corridor were suspended with mouths still hanging open in mid-command.
Stone. Every last one of them. Perfect, silent, enduring stone.
Whether the Empress would ever see fit to undo the petrification was an open question — one that, given her current mood, seemed to answer itself.
Back in the conference room, the remaining Shichibukai exchanged glances.
The silence said everything.
For a long moment, none of them moved. The Sky Screen still glowed faintly in the air, having delivered its judgment on the battle of Nine Snake Island with all the mercy of a final verdict. None of them were eager to be the first to speak.
Then someone set down a glass, and the spell broke.
There was no announcement, no formal deliberation. Simply a quiet, unanimous understanding spreading across the table like a tide pulling back from shore. No one could guarantee whose secrets would be next. The Sky Screen had already stripped Boa Hancock bare in front of the entire watching world — and if it could do that to the Empress of the Sea, it could do it to anyone.
Each of the Shichibukai was a creature built on reputation. Every single one of them had secrets they would sooner die than expose. The math was simple: the longer they remained in Mary Geoise, the greater the odds that the Sky Screen would serve them up as the next course at this grotesque banquet. No one wanted to be publicly executed before an audience that spanned kingdoms.
Better to leave. Better to leave now.
The chairs scraped back almost in unison.
The petrified corridor greeted them like a gallery exhibit — rows of stone agents frozen in perfect attitudes of interrupted authority. Some still pointed toward the door. Others stood with one hand raised mid-gesture, their indignation as permanently suspended as the rest of them. Dracule Mihawk paused to examine one particularly indignant stone face with mild academic curiosity before stepping deliberately around it.
The first dozen steps went uncontested.
Then Saint Nasujuro appeared.
He materialized from the far end of the hall like something that had simply always been there, waiting for the right moment to be noticed. Impossibly thin — the kind of skeletal fragility that made onlookers unconsciously brace for a strong wind. His skin was dry parchment stretched over prominent bone, every blood vessel mapped in faint blue lines beneath the surface. A pair of thick-lensed glasses perched on the sharp bridge of his nose, but the eyes behind those lenses held nothing resembling weakness. They were ancient eyes. Patient eyes. The eyes of something that had watched centuries turn without ever having reason to hurry.
Despite his frame, despite his apparent age, Saint Nasujuro radiated a pressure that had nothing to do with physical mass. It was the pressure of stone, of geological time, of forces that operated long after everything else had crumbled. The kind of authority that had never needed to shout.
His left hand had not moved from the hilt of his sword. It rested there with the unconscious permanence of a habit formed over lifetimes.
Boa Hancock measured him without flinching. Behind the stillness of her expression, the words Vegapunk had spoken in private circulated quietly through her mind — his careful, scientific hesitation when he had said that the five figures who commanded the World Government from their hidden throne might not be human in any conventional sense. Whatever they were beneath those robes and those faces, whatever centuries of accumulated power had done to the souls that wore those bodies, beauty had never held authority over them. She held no illusions about what she wielded here.
She also understood, with cold precision, that she couldn't win this fight.
The knowledge settled into her chest without panic. It didn't slow her steps.
"What?" The corner of her mouth curved — not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one. "Are you planning to make me a slave again? Is that what the God clan still wants from me?"
The words dropped into the silence of the stone corridor like blades thrown into still water.
Footsteps announced the others.
Donquixote Doflamingo emerged from the conference room doorway in no particular hurry, letting the great curtain of his feathered coat settle around him as he surveyed the scene with half-lidded eyes. He stopped where he stood, neither advancing nor retreating. His particular intelligence was knowing the precise moment when stillness was more valuable than any action — and looking at Saint Nasujuro's presence in that corridor, this was unquestionably that moment.
He didn't have the capital for this. Not yet. Not in his current form, not against these people, not with the Sky Screen having already shown the room what the future held for the Donquixote name. He would observe. He would learn. His time would come, as it always had.
Crocodile shouldered past without ceremony, a fresh cigar already between his teeth, his face wearing the expression of a man who had already spent far too long on a problem that was not his problem. He had an entire kingdom to reclaim. He had rebel armies brewing in Arabasta's desert heat and a woman called Robin still somewhere in the world, with knowledge locked inside her head that he needed. He was not about to spend another hour in a room with Five Elders when there was a country to steal.
Bartholomew Kuma moved last of all.
The enormous man stepped into the corridor without a word, and stood with the Shichibukai.
His expression had not changed — it rarely did, that great immovable face — but something behind his eyes was different from the man who had entered the conference room hours ago. The Sky Screen had done something to him that no order and no threat had ever managed. It had shown him the truth of what was coming, and more than that, it had shown him his daughter's future — Bonnie, at the right hand of God's Knights, bearing the same servitude he had always feared for her, in the very house he had always feared would claim her.
He thought of Ginny.
He thought of Ginny, who had given everything to a cause that gave nothing back in return, and had still found the strength to drag herself across half the world with disease consuming her flesh just to deliver their daughter into his arms before the end. She had asked nothing from him with her final breath except that Bonnie be spared the world's worst cruelties. She had not asked him to be a tool for the very people who had made her suffer.
Whatever leverage the Five Elders believed they still held over him had burned away in the light of the Sky Screen's revelation. The Nikyu Nikyu no Mi (Paw-Paw Fruit) could send anything it touched to the far edge of existence. Threats required something to threaten.
Bartholomew Kuma had already made his choice.
Sea Knight Jinbe moved with the deliberate calm of a man whose mind was already somewhere else entirely. While his body navigated the petrified corridor, his thoughts had already moved ahead — tracing routes, calculating distances, running through what the Sky Screen had revealed about a shark-type fish-man named Hoshigaki Kisame who would one day carry Samehada at a Marine Fleet Admiral's side with the title of Admiral Kaitora.
The sight had done something complicated to Jinbe. It had also done something to the five million souls living at the bottom of the ocean in Fish-Man Island's eternal dark — and he had seen it in their faces before the screen had shown it in their words. A path. An open door. Not the path Fisher Tiger had envisioned, perhaps, but a path nonetheless.
He needed to find Kisame before the Marine did. Not to recruit him, necessarily — simply to be known to him, one fish-man to another, before loyalty to an institution had calcified into everything. The rest could be worked out in time.
One step at a time.
Dracule Mihawk brought up the rear.
His stride was unhurried, as it always was. His expression was the expression of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by anything the world chose to present him with, and who had graduated from mild interest in human affairs to something closer to mild exasperation at being required to attend them. He stepped around a stone agent without breaking stride, tucked his hands behind his back, and considered the corridor stretching before him.
He had come to Mary Geoise to conduct routine business. He had instead been seated in a room while the Sky Screen dissected the Empress of the Sea in front of an audience that included people he had no professional respect for whatsoever. The exercise had been, objectively, a waste of an afternoon that he could have spent doing nearly anything else.
His island had perfectly serviceable terrain. His gorillas, whatever else might be said of them, were remarkably consistent training partners. He had been midway through considering a restructuring of the garden layout when the summons had arrived, and the thought had never quite been completed.
He resolved to complete it on the return voyage.
Somewhere at the end of the corridor, a thin old man with a sword at his hip stood in the silence of a gallery of statues and watched the Seven Warlords of the Sea walk away from Mary Geoise without permission. The weight of his ancient authority pressed down on the marble floors and accomplished nothing whatsoever.
The heels clicked on.
The corridor emptied.
Mary Geoise, for a time, was occupied only by stone.