-Real World-
The Seven Warlords of the Sea were never meant to be caged.
Every person in that conference room understood this — the Five Elders included. Men and women of that caliber did not sit quietly in holy cities waiting for old men to decide what to do with them. The Shichibukai were useful precisely because they were volatile, because they operated outside the structures that governed lesser powers, and because their cooperation had to be purchased rather than commanded. Trapping them indefinitely in Mary Geoise was not a policy. It was a countdown.
But the Sky Screen had forced everyone's hand.
Before Empress Boa Hancock had walked out of the conference room and turned the entire corridor into a stone gallery, the Five Elders had already been under pressure that was becoming difficult to contain. The Sky Screen had not merely broadcast secrets — it had broadcast the structure of secrets, the connective tissue between things that were never supposed to be seen in the same light. The sensation of being guided by something they could not identify, steered toward revelations they could not prevent, had settled into Pangaea Castle like a cold fog that no amount of authority could burn away.
It was profoundly uncomfortable. And the Five Elders were not accustomed to discomfort.
"The Sky Screen has already leaked more than enough." Saint Saturn's voice was flat and precise, carrying the particular quality of a man who had never once in his life needed to raise it to be heard. He leaned forward on his crutches, the weight of his frame distributed with a mechanical stillness that had nothing natural about it. "Sooner or later, every secret we possess will be exposed. The longer we wait, the worse our position becomes. We act now, or we accept that we are no longer the ones dictating the pace of events."
Around the chamber, other presences absorbed this without visible reaction.
Saint Saturn had always been the sharpest of them when it came to threat escalation. Where others deliberated, he calculated. Where others weighed costs, he identified the single most efficient solution and pursued it with the indifference of a natural phenomenon. Compromise was not a concept he had ever found useful. When a problem was identified, it required resolution — by whatever means the resolution required. He had never seen reason to qualify that principle.
The question of whether Kaido, the King of Beasts, was truly Joy Boy or merely a claimant to that legacy — he dismissed it without ceremony. The theological dimensions were irrelevant. What mattered was that Kaido was the most dangerous individual alive who was not already dead or under their control, that the Sky Screen had associated him with a liberation mythology eight hundred years old, and that the historical record of what Joy Boy had done to the God clan's predecessors was not something any of them needed to review.
Anyone suspected of carrying that mantle had to be eliminated. Immediately. Without investigation, without debate, without the indulgence of gathering further evidence.
"The Devil Fruit secret being exposed works heavily against us," Saint Saturn continued. "We have to complete what needs completing before those humans find a way to unite around what they've learned. Once they do, the arithmetic changes against us in ways that become increasingly difficult to correct."
Saint Nasujuro said nothing for a moment. His left hand had not moved from his sword hilt since he had returned to the chamber, and his eyes behind their thick lenses were turned toward something that was not in the room.
He was thinking about eight hundred years. He was thinking about how many times, across those eight hundred years, the God clan had faced a version of this same problem, and how they had resolved it each time, and what it had cost each time, and what would be required to resolve it again now.
Joy Boy. The one name in eight centuries that represented a genuine existential threat to everything the God clan had built. Not a pirate, not a revolutionary, not a reformist king or an ambitious Marine commander. Joy Boy. The liberation fighter who had come closer than any other force in recorded history to dismantling the architecture of the world's power before it had fully calcified.
The only way the Celestial Dragon system had survived this long was through the continued suppression of exactly what the Sky Screen was now broadcasting freely — the existence of the Joy Boy mythology, the truth about Devil Fruit consciousness, the nature of the beings who wore the Five Elders' faces. All of it was seeping out into the open, and ignorant humans, for all their predictable short attention spans, were absorbing it in quantities that made the old strategies less reliable with every passing hour.
"Kaido cannot be allowed to remain a problem," Nasujuro said finally. "The King of Beasts has been sitting in the Devil's Triangle long enough. If we allow him to continue growing into whatever the Sky Screen suggests he becomes, the difficulty of the operation increases geometrically. It must be done now, while conditions still favor decisive action."
The weight of that assessment settled across the chamber.
If the Sixth Heaven Demon King — Blackbeard Marshall D. Teach, at the apex of whatever that grotesque three-fruit convergence was becoming — and Medusa, the entity that had devoured Boa Hancock's consciousness on the Sky Screen, were ever simultaneously unleashed at full capacity, the Five Elders' current resources would not be sufficient to contain them. The five of them understood this with a clarity that had nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with accurate self-assessment.
Their own true forms — the Gyūki, the Bakotsu , the Sandworm, the Itsumade, the Feng Xi — were second-tier demons by any honest reckoning. They could not compete with Medusa's authority. They could not contend with the Sixth Heaven Demon King's scale. These were not opinions. These were conclusions drawn from centuries of monitoring the power hierarchy of mythological entities, and the conclusions were not flattering.
The God clan had maintained its position not through overwhelming raw strength but through institutional control, through information management, through the careful suppression of anything that might challenge the order they had spent eight hundred years constructing. The Sky Screen was dismantling that control mechanism in real time, and the window during which brute-force intervention could still produce reliable outcomes was closing.
Most of the world's population, saturated in the ordinary demands of daily survival, would not retain the deeper implications of what the Sky Screen revealed. This was the one advantage the Five Elders retained — that ordinary humans were profoundly, reliably inattentive to anything that did not immediately threaten their dinner. The ordinary person watching the Sky Screen would be transfixed by the spectacle of the Empress of the Sea's secrets being exposed; they would not be building theoretical frameworks about Devil Fruit consciousness and the implications for the power structures governing their civilization.
But the dangerous ones would. The ones who collected information. The ones who built frameworks. The ones who were already suspicious. Those people were the problem — and their numbers had just increased significantly.
The Five Elders' concern went beyond the public revelation. Their own secrets were coming. The Sky Screen had not yet shown their transformed states to the world — Vegapunk's assessment currently remained speculation in the minds of everyone watching — but the cameras would get there eventually. The only question was whether they could finish what needed finishing before that particular revelation landed.
The secondary fear was worse: other demons, waking up.
The mythological hierarchy was not static. Stronger entities could be roused by sufficient chaos, by the right convergence of power and trauma and symbolic resonance, and any entity strong enough to contest the God clan's ecological niche would not do so politely. The five of them had no intention of sharing whatever remained of the world's power structure with competitors who had been dormant for centuries. Any sign of awakening, any individual showing the potential to become a vector for that kind of resurgence, had to be eliminated at the source.
This was why Joy Boy could not be permitted to exist in any form.
The Shichibukai's sudden departure forced the meeting forward in a way that deliberation alone had not managed.
Saint Nasujuro had gone into the corridor personally. Not because he had expected to stop them, precisely, but because certain gestures were required even when their outcomes were uncertain. He had looked at Boa Hancock and felt the particular cold calculation of a swordsman measuring an opponent's capabilities against his own confidence — and had concluded, with the honesty that centuries of practice imposed, that the margin was not comfortable.
He had offered them a bargain instead.
"The operation to subjugate Kaido will proceed within the next few days," he had said, and the flatness of his voice in that stone corridor of statues had given the words the quality of geological inevitability. "We require your cooperation — joint action alongside the Admirals to neutralize the target completely, in a single decisive engagement. What follows will be worth your effort."
The Shichibukai were not idealists. They were, to a person, extraordinarily expensive to maintain and extraordinarily useful when properly motivated. This was their fundamental nature, and the Five Elders had been managing creatures of this nature for long enough to know that the price of their cooperation had to be specific, concrete, and genuinely worth having.
Crocodile's demand was the easiest to address.
The man wanted Arabasta. He had spent years building the apparatus to take it — the Baroque Works network, the patient manipulation of its internal political fractures, the careful cultivation of a rebel movement that could be triggered at the moment of his choosing. He was, objectively, a competent state actor working toward a well-defined goal. The Kingdom of Arabasta was, objectively, not strategically critical to the World Government in any way that could not be compensated for by changing the name on the tribute payment forms.
The Nefertari family had made their choice eight hundred years ago — removing themselves from the God clan's ranks, forfeiting their status as Celestial Dragons, binding their fate to the ordinary world they had decided was worth defending. The Five Elders had never pretended to respect that decision. What happened to the Nefertari family now was simply the long-delayed consequence of that original miscalculation.
As long as Crocodile maintained the Heavenly Tribute schedule and kept the kingdom's population sufficiently subdued to remain a productive source of taxation revenue, the World Government had no meaningful objection to who was signing the payment orders. A tax farmer was a tax farmer. The five old men of the Gorosei had never wasted sentiment on which particular human beings were suffering under which particular arrangement. That was not what the world was for.
Arabasta would have a new ruler. The Nefertari family would bear the consequences of their ancestor's idealism. Such was the nature of inherited decisions.
Sea Knight Jinbe was more delicate, but no less tractable.
The World Government's leverage over Fish-Man Island had always operated through the same basic mechanism — hope. Not the delivery of actual racial equality, which would require a restructuring of social hierarchies so fundamental that it had never seriously been considered, but the credibility of the promise that equality was possible, that the relationship between the surface world and the kingdom at the bottom of the ocean might improve, that the long arc of history was bending toward something better.
This promise cost nothing to maintain. It required no actual concession. It required only periodic gestures — official statements, symbolic acknowledgments, the occasional administrative intervention that could be framed as progress without changing any underlying structure. The mermaids whose politics were shaped by optimism would respond to these gestures with the reliable gratitude of people who had been waiting so long for any positive sign that they could not afford to be skeptical about the ones they received.
They would step in. They would ease tensions. They would issue statements. The Empress's slave history, as documented by the Sky Screen, was an embarrassment — but the Five Elders were old enough to understand that embarrassments could be managed. They could offer Boa Hancock the Celestial Dragons responsible for enslaving her and her sisters — not as a genuine acknowledgment of wrongdoing, not as an apology, but as a gift. A few fat, worthless members of the nobility fed to Amazon Lily in exchange for political cooperation was an entirely acceptable arithmetic.
If she needed more, more could be provided. There was no shortage of expendable Celestial Dragons.
A public apology was, of course, entirely out of the question. But the Five Elders had never had any difficulty distinguishing between what was offered and what was meant.
The room settled into the kind of silence that follows a decision being made rather than simply discussed.
The operation against Kaido, King of Beasts — in the Devil's Triangle, far from any population center where the collateral damage could become an inconvenient witness — would proceed. The Shichibukai would be compensated. The loose ends would be addressed.
Joy Boy would not be permitted to exist.
This was the only item on which all five of them were in complete and immediate agreement. Whatever Kaido was or was not, whatever the Sky Screen intended to suggest about his destiny or his significance, the liberation fighter's legacy had been dangerous once and would be made dangerous again if they allowed the mythology to take root in a living vessel.
Eight hundred years of management had taught the Five Elders one lesson above all others: the most efficient moment to destroy something was always before it became what it was going to be.
They had been almost too late once.
They would not be almost too late again.
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