-Real World-
The war preparations were proceeding on schedule.
In Mary Geoise, the Five Elders' machinery was in motion — six Shichibukai and three Admirals as the primary strike force, the God's Knights and supporting Vice Admirals filling in the flanks, with Fleet Admiral Sengoku, Vice Admiral Garp, and the rest of Marineford's command structure providing the strategic backbone. A joint operation of this scale had not been assembled in living memory. The Five Elders did not believe the lineup could fail to bring down Kaido, the King of Beasts, no matter how many rounds it required. The casualties were, in their accounting, the price of a necessary outcome.
The ships were moving. The orders had been signed. The countdown had started.
And somewhere on the far edge of all of this, in a small wooden house that the world's greatest powers had no idea existed, a man stretched his arms over his head with the deeply satisfied groan of someone who had been waiting a very long time for something to finally happen.
Artoria had relayed the intelligence the moment it reached her — a brief, professional communication through the channel she maintained with the person who had been, from the very beginning, the actual architect of everything the Sky Screen had been showing the world. The message was efficient. The deployment timeline. The force composition. The Five Elders' decision to move.
Kaito set down the Den Den Mushi, cracked his back, and let himself grin at the ceiling of his entirely unremarkable wooden house.
"Okay," he said, to no one in particular. "Things are finally getting interesting."
He had been keeping track. Chapters and chapters of events cascading outward from the original lie — the Warlords fracturing, the Devil Fruit consciousness revelation reverberating across every power bloc in the world, the Five Elders reacting with the predictable aggression of entities who had managed their information ecosystem for eight hundred years and were watching it dissolve in real time. The Nine Snake Island catastrophe. Kuma's quietly detonated loyalty. Mihawk sharpening his sword in a petrified corridor.
All of it had unfolded without him present in any direct sense. He had been the instigator of a detonation that was still in the middle of going off, watching from a safe distance while the world responded to a fire he'd lit before most of the current players had understood what they were standing in.
But the Kaido operation — that was different. That was the kind of event you participated in.
The Grand Tale System's voice materialized in his thoughts with its characteristic tone of cheerful, deeply inconvenient accuracy.
[Host, a reminder: your accumulated Infamy Points have reached levels that represent a significant liability. The Sky Screen's credibility as a reliable source of future revelation rests on the coherence of what it shows. You've been neglecting personnel deployment in the real world while the broadcast continues generating future Admirals. If viewers compare what appears on the Sky Screen with what they can actually verify at sea, the arithmetic starts working against you. The grand performance requires performers. You're running a cast-deficit.]
Kaito already knew this. He had known it for a while and had been, if he was being entirely honest with himself, avoiding thinking about it. The broadcast was built on a very specific ratio — enough genuine truth to make the fabrications credible, enough strategic misdirection to keep anyone from pulling on the right thread. The Sky Screen had shown twelve Marine Admirals representing every race and species in the world. If only a handful of those Admirals could actually be verified at sea, eventually someone with the right combination of intelligence resources and suspicious temperament would start doing the subtraction.
The Marine and the World Government were not stupid. They were compromised by power and old thinking, but they were not stupid.
"I know, I know," he said. "The cast needs filling. That's why I'm here."
The problem was the hero pool. The Grand Tale System's summoning mechanic had always operated on the principle that randomness was a feature rather than a flaw — that the specific character you needed might not be the character the system chose to give you, and that this unpredictability was, from the system's perspective, the entire point. It was not a tool. It was entertainment, and Kaito was the audience whether he wanted to be or not.
He needed specific heroes. Future Admirals. Characters who fit the slots the Sky Screen had already shown the world. He needed to be able to choose rather than roll.
"Is there a way to search the pool? Target a specific summon?"
[There is. The hero pool can be upgraded to include a targeted search function. Cost: eighty percent of your current accumulated Infamy Points.]
Kaito felt the blood drain from his face.
He covered his chest with one hand. His vision narrowed slightly at the edges. Somewhere in the warm afternoon quiet of the wooden house, a silence fell that had the specific quality of a man calculating how long he had spent accumulating those points and then doing the arithmetic on what eighty percent of that meant in concrete terms of time, effort, and operationally deployed elaborate deceptions.
"Eighty," he said, flatly. "Eighty percent."
[You would retain twenty percent. This remains sufficient for continued operations.]
"Sufficient for —" He stopped. Took a breath. "That is an aorta tap. That is a direct line into the aorta and you know it."
[You may also choose to continue using the existing random pool. The choice belongs to the host. I am not applying pressure.]
The system was absolutely applying pressure. The system had the particular quality of something that understood its user's psychology with crystalline precision and phrased every interaction in a way that made the inevitable outcome feel like a free decision. Kaito had no real alternative. The Sky Screen's coherence required the cast to exist. The cast's existence required targeted summons. Targeted summons required the upgrade. The system had designed a box and was politely explaining that the door was still technically open.
He thought about the Sky Screen showing twelve Admirals and only four of them actually being findable at sea. He thought about Sengoku, specifically — Sengoku, who was not stupid, who had decades of institutional pattern-recognition built into his thinking, who would eventually notice that the future he was watching did not match the present he was capable of investigating.
"Do it," Kaito said, and felt the loss immediately — not as a sound or a sensation, but as the particular cold clarity of watching something you worked for disappear from an account you couldn't recover.
The system processed. The hero pool upgraded. The draw cost went up tenfold, because of course it did — a premium search function implemented through premium extraction mechanics, with all the structural elegance of a game studio that had decided its primary design philosophy was finding new angles from which to bill the player. Kaito respected it, grudgingly, the way you respect a pickpocket who is genuinely skilled at their work.
The choice of who to summon first was, in its own way, its own kind of problem.
Esdeath, Hoshigaki Kisame, Wendy — the Sky Screen had shown all of them as future Admirals. Each represented a different strategic value, a different kind of gap in the current believability of the broadcast's predictions. If he could only deploy one now, before the Kaido operation changed everything, the priority ranking was fairly clear.
Wendy was young. Kisame's deployment required navigating Fish-Man Island politics in ways that weren't yet aligned. Esdeath — Esdeath was an Admiral-class combatant who the Sky Screen had already shown paired alongside Sakazuki as one of the two names that pirates feared most among the new Marine's senior leadership. She was the version of absolute justice that made even Sakazuki's philosophy look conservative by comparison. She was a name. A face. A known quantity in the world the broadcast was building.
And she was, Kaito thought with the particular self-awareness of a person who was operating an interworld intelligence fabrication network and could still be affected by the basic aesthetic facts of life, objectively striking in a way that the rest of his operational priorities had never quite managed to be.
He confirmed the selection.
The retrieval process took several minutes. The targeted summon function worked differently from the random pool — slower, more deliberate, with the quality of something being pulled carefully from a very long distance rather than grabbed at random from whatever was closest. When it completed, the result was a woman standing in the middle of his wooden house with the posture of someone who had never once in her life needed to adjust to a new environment because all environments were simply different contexts in which she was still the most dangerous thing present.
Her uniform was white — clean lines, military cut, fitted precisely to a figure that managed to be simultaneously elegant and conveying the impression of a weapon kept in a good holster. Blue hair caught the light from the window, long and smooth, falling across pale skin with the kind of natural arrangement that suggested the universe had decided aesthetic coherence was worth maintaining. Her face was the face of an ice sculpture that had learned to express contempt without changing its composition: cold, precise, with a slight upward tilt at the corners of her mouth that might have been a smile on someone else and was, on her, more accurately described as an assessment.
She looked around the wooden house once, thoroughly, with the flat professional attention of someone cataloguing potential threats and finding none.
"Am I resurrected?" she said.
It took the better part of an hour to cover the essential orientation. Kaito had developed a working format for this by now — the structure of the world, the Grand Line's geography and the power dynamics that shaped it, the Marine's role, the Yonko's territories, the Sky Screen's existence and the particular lie architecture it was maintaining. Esdeath absorbed all of it with the focused, unhurried attention of someone for whom information was simply ammunition to be stored until useful.
She had died in her original world. She understood this without visible distress. What she seemed to find more interesting was the shape of the world she'd been delivered into — a world with power systems built on Devil Fruits and Haki rather than Teigu and Imperial Arms, with a global authority structure that was, she noted with what might have been professional appreciation, remarkably similar in its fundamental corruption to the one she had served.
The Marine was her career path. She had been a general. She would be an Admiral. The relationship with Saint Saturn required some adjustment — their history, as Kaito outlined it carefully, involved a period of experimental interference that she was technically unaware of having experienced. He suggested she maintain professional distance and minimal disclosure regarding her ice capabilities' true origin.
She filed this without comment. Her relationship to her own history had never been the complicated part of her psychology.
"I will need to test this world's strongest," she said, when he had finished. Not as a question. As a statement of the order in which things would be arranged.
"You'll have opportunities," Kaito told her, with the confidence of someone who had been engineering opportunities for over four hundred chapters and had not yet run out.
With the targeted pool burned for the immediate priority and Esdeath already oriented and preparing to make her appearance at the Marine in whatever way would generate the most productive chaos, Kaito turned his attention to the random pool's remaining balance.
He pulled ten.
The results arrived in sequence, each one displaying with the Grand Tale System's characteristic deadpan, and Kaito read through them with an expression that traveled from mild interest through resignation to the specific stillness of a man deciding how to feel about a situation he had no control over.
Yasuo (League of Legends)
Deneve (Claymore)
Kimimaro (Naruto)
Jade Chan (The Adventures of Jackie Chan)
Tsumiki Fushiguro (Jujutsu Kaisen)
Garou (One Punch Man)
Naraku (Inuyasha)
Miranda Lott (D.Gray-man)
Kira Yoshikage (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable)
Kokushibo (Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba)
He sat with this for a moment.
The Grand Tale System's random pool remained, as it had always been, a committed practitioner of the belief that what the host needed and what the host got were two different and unrelated questions.
Still. Resources were resources.
Kaito looked at the list again, considered the architecture of the mess that the Kaido operation was about to make of everyone's plans, and started thinking about where, specifically, in that mess, a man who could kill anything he touched by shaking its hand would be most usefully positioned.
The world was not going to run out of problems to solve.
Neither, apparently, was he going to run out of extremely unconventional tools with which to approach them.