-Broadcast-
The Beasts Pirates had always had a succession problem.
It was not the kind of problem that anyone said out loud, because saying it out loud in Kaido's presence tended to produce outcomes that were difficult to walk away from, but it lived in the back of every senior cadre's thinking the way uncomfortable truths always did — present, persistent, and requiring periodic active effort not to look at directly. The simple version: if something happened to the King of Beasts, who inherited? Who kept the organization from fragmenting into the dozens of competing factions that would immediately materialize the moment the central authority was gone?
Yamato was the answer on paper. Yamato was the captain's blood and Yamato had grown up inside the Beasts Pirates the way trees grow in the vicinity of rivers — shaped by the proximity even when the relationship with the water was complicated. But Yamato had also spent the better part of her formative years insisting loudly and at every available opportunity that she was Kozuki Oden, which was the kind of position that made even people who were genuinely fond of her hesitate when the question of institutional succession came up. Being willing to follow your captain was one thing. Being willing to follow your captain who had spent years in principled opposition to your captain, had been beaten by said captain's kanabō with the regularity of a seasonal event, and still maintained that her actual identity belonged to a samurai who had been dead for decades — that was a different calculation.
The old men in the upper ranks were not confident. They had watched Yamato grow and had concluded, privately, that she was extraordinary in ways that were genuinely difficult to quantify, and also that her particular relationship with reality made institutional succession a more interesting question than it strictly needed to be.
King kept his thoughts on this to himself, as he kept most of his thoughts on most things, and walked deeper into Onigashima.
The drums announced the courtyard before he reached it.
They were not playing for performance. They were playing because whoever was playing them had decided, at some point in the past five years, that this was what he did in the mornings — or afternoons, or whenever the mood arrived — and had not been dissuaded from this position by any external input. The sound was enormous. It filled the open space between Onigashima's inner walls the way weather fills a valley, not simply audible but present in a structural sense, something the chest understood before the ears had finished processing it.
The courtyard itself was a sea of drums.
King had stopped being surprised by this some time ago. He moved through the instruments arranged across the open space and found what he was looking for at the center of it: the figure who occupied the courtyard the way a landmark occupies geography — not because it was placed there but because it simply was there, and everything else in the vicinity organized itself around that fact.
Ten meters of muscle and presence, black hair moving in whatever wind existed at the altitude his shoulders occupied, a pair of horns catching the light at their tips with the matter-of-fact sharpness of things that had never needed to be decorative. The dragon-scale tattoo on his left arm moved when he moved, each scale detail articulating with the flex of the muscle beneath it as though genuinely considering its next position. The beard fell and rose with the rhythm he was generating, a full percussion that shifted registers — low as foundation, high as weather, somewhere in the middle that felt like the particular quality of a force that had decided to be patient about something and found the decision interesting.
He was, by any observable metric, a man entirely present in what he was doing.
After the final measure resolved — and it resolved properly, the sound decaying through the last grace notes rather than simply stopping — Kaido accepted a towel from one of the attendants waiting at the courtyard's edge and turned his attention to King with the particular quality of a large, calm thing acknowledging a smaller thing that it had been aware of for some time.
Character Notes materialized across the Sky Screen's display:
Captain of the Beasts Pirates — Kaido (Nika). User of the Uo Uo no Mi, Model: Seiryū (Fish-Fish Fruit, Azure Dragon).
"Buggy didn't hold you long," Kaido said. His voice had the low register of something that had never needed to project because the space between him and whoever he was addressing was simply not wide enough to require it. "He let you come back quickly. I would have thought the world outside was interesting enough."
King had a great deal to report. He had been thinking about how to organize it since he left the Infinity Castle, structuring the relevant points in the order that would be most useful to his boss, the implications that connected most directly to the Beasts Pirates' strategic position, the things about Buggy's organization that Kaido needed to understand before the operation against their current circumstances changed.
He opened his mouth.
Kaido held up a hand.
"It can wait. Let me clean up first." He handed the towel back. "Wait for me in the side courtyard. I won't be long."
He walked away without checking whether this was acceptable, because it was not the kind of statement that was making an inquiry. Two attendants followed at the appropriate distance.
King stood in the sea of drums and considered the silence that had replaced the sound.
Five years had changed Kaido in ways that the cadres had initially assumed were a phase and had subsequently revised their position on.
The roughness was still there in the fundamentals — in the size, the authority, the absolute confidence in his own position in any hierarchy that included him — but it had acquired a kind of curatorship that had not been present before. He washed. He changed into clean clothes before receiving visitors. He played drums with genuine musicianship rather than raw force. He had, somewhere in the past several years, decided that the gap between being the strongest thing alive and being a complete barbarian about it was a gap worth crossing.
The cadres had watched this development with the careful attention of people who had survived long enough in the Beasts Pirates to know that their captain's moods and evolutions had direct practical implications for everyone around him, and had concluded, one by one, that whatever had shifted in Kaido over the past half-decade was not making him less dangerous. If anything, a Kaido who was paying attention to his surroundings in the way that you did when you had a considered sense of aesthetics and preference was a Kaido who was operating with more deliberation than before, and a Kaido operating with deliberation was a different kind of force from a Kaido operating on pure momentum.
The Beasts Pirates had flourished during this period. The territory was larger. The organization was tighter. The Beast Soldiers were better. The senior cadres were stronger than they had been when the Sky Screen had first begun broadcasting the world's increasingly complicated future.
And Yamato — who had spent years at war with her father on the question of her own identity, the value of Wano Country, and approximately everything else available to be at war about — had found the relationship easing into something that still contained regular violence but also contained, occasionally, other things. The occasional acknowledgment. The rare moment of understanding that neither of them could have named without making it awkward.
It was not reconciliation. It was not even close to that. But it was progress, measured in the specific units that people used when the baseline for comparison was very bad and any upward movement counted.
King thought about this for a moment and then set it aside, because it was not the kind of thing that his input would improve.
"Lord King." The voice came from the far edge of the courtyard. "Are you here to appreciate the flowers as well?"
He turned.
She was seated on the garden wall with the comfortable confidence of someone who had decided that walls were for sitting on when you were in the mood, and had no particular interest in revising this position based on what the wall's architectural function might have been intended to be. Her golden hair was arranged up with the precise effort that looked effortless, the kind of styling that required considerable time to achieve and communicated, by achieving it, that the person in question had considered whether her appearance warranted the investment and arrived at a conclusion. Her emerald eyes moved over King with the particular quality of intelligence evaluating something for its usefulness or entertainment value — a calculation that arrived at a result very quickly and filed it without visible judgment.
The kimono was elaborate. Everything about Black Maria was elaborate in the way that things were elaborate when elaborate was a deliberate strategy rather than a preference.
Character Notes:
Tobiroppō of the Beasts Pirates — Black Maria. Kumo Kumo no Mi, Model: Rosamygale Grauvogeli (Spider-Spider Fruit, Ancient Species).
"I'm waiting for the captain," King said.
"I know." She smiled, which was the kind of smile that came from a face that had used smiles as tools for long enough that the tool had become its own natural expression. "You're always very direct about what you're doing. It's either your best quality or your most boring one. I haven't decided which."
King said nothing.
Black Maria's position among the Tobiroppō was a matter of frank assessment within the upper ranks. Her strength was not her highest attribute — she was the weakest among the six of them by any direct combat metric, and she knew this as well as anyone, and had apparently concluded at some point that this was information about her that was not particularly relevant to what she actually did, which was control Onigashima's intelligence network with an efficiency that the other five Tobiroppō, who could all defeat her in a straight fight, could not approach or replicate.
The Black Widow. She had dealt with more spies from Wano Country than any other person on the island — not through combat, usually, but through the particular combination of access and analysis that came from controlling the information flow of a complex organization. She knew what happened on Onigashima. She knew who was talking to whom, what they were saying, and what the gap between what they were saying and what they were actually doing suggested about their intentions.
King had no interest in provoking her, for this reason among others, and also had no particular interest in making conversation with her, for reasons that were his own and that he had not shared with anyone including Kaido, who had been making his opinions about King's personal situation known through a variety of indirect gestures for several years now.
He stood by the drums and waited.
Black Maria watched him with the patient interest of someone who was also waiting, and was significantly more comfortable with the waiting than he was, and knew it.
"You really are the most straightforward person on this island," she said, after a while. Not unkindly. It had the quality of an observation that was also, in some sense, appreciation, though appreciation of what exactly was not entirely clear.
King had no response to offer that would improve the situation, so he did not offer one.
The heavy sound of footsteps arrived from the passage leading from the inner compound — the particular cadence of someone who was very large and not in any hurry and had no reason to be. Kaido, changed into dry clothes, stepped into the courtyard.
He looked at King, and the expression beneath the surface of his face — the thing that was not quite a smile and not quite something else, the quality that had appeared in his bearing at some point in the past five years and had not left since — settled into place the way a large thing settled when it had finally arrived somewhere it intended to be.
"All right," he said. "Tell me about the Infinity Castle."
King began talking.