-Real World-
Arabasta was holding together by the particular kind of tension that preceded collapse — not the tension of something about to break but the tension of something that had been under sustained pressure for long enough that the question was no longer whether it would give but when.
The Straw Hat Pirates were somewhere in the kingdom, moving carefully, disguised when they went out, aware that the wrong piece of exposure at the wrong moment could detonate the entire situation into a catastrophe that nobody currently had the resources to contain. The Blackbeard Pirates were doing the same calculation from a different position, their famous captain keeping himself out of sight in the territory of the royal capital with the specific caution of a man who understood that the attention the Sky Screen had placed on him was the kind that made every movement visible to people with hostile intentions.
King Cobra had one army. He had always had one army. Against the hundred thousand rebels that Baroque Works had spent years carefully cultivating, his one army was an arithmetic problem with a solution that nobody in the palace was finding easy to look at directly.
The cafe in which Galdino was currently sitting existed in a different register entirely from the crisis pressing against the kingdom's administrative structures from every direction.
It was pleasant. The coffee was good. Zala had brought the cup herself, which she had not done before the Sky Screen had displayed his future career trajectory alongside Admiral Sakazuki's for comparative analysis. The change in her behavior — and in the behavior of essentially everyone else in Baroque Works who had previously treated Galdino as a moderately useful cadre with an interesting Devil Fruit and no particularly remarkable future — had arrived within about forty-eight hours of that broadcast and had not receded since.
He was not complaining.
The fear had come first, naturally — the specific terror of a man who has just been publicly associated with an Admiral-level threat assessment and knows that the people who make those assessments have very large ships and very few restraints. He had spent several days not sleeping well, watching every horizon for warships, running the calculation on whether he could get away fast enough if Sakazuki decided that the Sky Screen's comparison was an insult worth addressing in person.
Nothing had come. The Admiral apparently had other priorities, which was the most relieving form of indifference Galdino had ever experienced.
What remained after the fear cleared was the social reality: the cadres of Baroque Works were treating him with the careful attentiveness of people managing an asset they were worried about losing. Mr. 1, whose face had been designed by nature or adversity into an expression that registered most positive emotions as a grimace, was producing something in the vicinity of a smile when they passed in the corridors. It was not a good smile. It was the smile of a man whose face had not been consulted about the decision. But it was a smile.
"Future Upper Moon Three," Zala said, settling across the table with the kind of deliberate placement that communicated she had thought about where she was sitting before she sat. Her blue hair was arranged with the precision of someone who understood that appearance was a tool. "The position in the Joker Pirates — that's not something the boss would hand out carelessly, even for someone with your abilities."
Galdino held his coffee cup and thought about Douglas Bullet.
The man who had given away the Eternal Pose to Laugh Tale — the single most strategically valuable navigational item in the world — was Upper Moon Four in Buggy's organization. Galdino was Upper Moon Three. Douglas Bullet was, by any objective combat metric, one of the most dangerous human beings alive. If the ranking reflected strength rather than contribution, the math required some explanation.
The explanation, as best Galdino could construct it, was that the Sky Screen's hierarchy for the Joker Pirates was not based on who could hit the hardest. It was based on something else. He was not entirely certain what that something else was, but he had the self-awareness to understand that he was currently the beneficiary of a classification he had not yet done anything to earn, and that the appropriate response to this was to start figuring out what earning it actually required.
He let Zala refill his cup.
He also let his hand drift in the direction of hers as she set down the bottle, and she let this happen with a patience that had nothing to do with approval and everything to do with the calculation that Baroque Works could not afford to antagonize him right now. Galdino was aware of this. He was not as oblivious as the gesture might suggest. He was simply a man who had recently discovered that his future was considerably more interesting than his present, and was enjoying the transitional period.
"The boss doesn't want to lose you," Zala said, with the specific tone of someone relaying a message that was also a fact and also a gentle structural warning about certain courses of action. "You're valued here."
"Yes," Galdino agreed pleasantly. "I know."
In the Sky Screen's view of Onigashima's future, King was watching.
The broadcast had been cycling through the faces of Beasts Pirates cadres who had not yet been formally introduced to the world watching the Sky Screen — figures operating under Kaido's flag whose names and faces were unknown quantities to the intelligence services of every faction currently trying to build profiles on the Joker Pirates' organizational structure and capabilities.
The Beasts Pirates were running the same exercise from the other direction: watching unfamiliar strong men appear in the Joker Pirates' broadcasts and working backward through whatever sources were available to find out who these people were before circumstances made the information urgent.
One of the figures that had appeared in recent broadcasts wore green skin that suggested either a Devil Fruit transformation sustained indefinitely or a biology that had diverged from standard parameters. The eyes were cold and precise in a way that King recognized as the expression of someone who had processed violence until it stopped requiring emotional investment. An efficient killer who had been doing the work long enough that it had become simply work.
Another was female, and her energy registered as the kind of chaotic that was dangerous specifically because it did not follow the patterns that experience allowed you to anticipate. Unpredictable in combat was a threat category that bypassed a lot of conventional defensive preparation.
Both would need to be accounted for in any future operational calculus involving the Joker Pirates.
Without the captain present, the primary authority on Onigashima resolved to Queen the Plague. This was producing in Queen the specific kind of concentrated effort that a man applied when he understood that his performance in an unusual role was being observed and evaluated by someone he did not want to disappoint.
He was managing the organization. He was also managing Wano Country's surrounding politics, which meant managing the ongoing effort to locate the remaining Kozuki loyalists before those loyalists could organize into something that required more than a standard cleanup response. The nine Red Scabbards had appeared in the Sky Screen's broadcasts with sufficient detail to produce usable identification profiles, and those profiles were being distributed through the Beasts Pirates' Wano Country apparatus with the expectation that actionable results would follow.
The name Kozuki Hiyori had emerged from the intelligence work with some frequency. The princess of the Kozuki family — daughter of the man whose legacy the Beasts Pirates had been managing the suppression of for twenty years — was apparently somewhere in Wano Country, and apparently not particularly difficult to locate if you knew what you were looking for.
The specific challenge was that what they were looking for and what she had arranged to be visible as were not the same thing. The little purple oiran who visited the Shogun's mansion at regular intervals, moving through the official entertainment circuits with the normalized invisibility of a beautiful woman in a role that powerful men had decided to treat as furniture — she was not on any list connecting her to the Kozuki name. She had been careful. She had been very careful, for a very long time.
Queen was working the problem. Jack, whose considerable combat capabilities were unfortunately not matched by the analytical skills that intelligence work required, was doing what Jack did best: applying pressure in the directions he was pointed and waiting to be pointed in a useful direction. Queen pointed him occasionally and managed the downstream consequences.
It was not efficient. It was functional.
In the Devil's Triangle, the situation was considerably less structured.
Kaido had found a barrel of something with enough alcohol content to produce genuine effect on a man of his biology, and had applied himself to this task with the commitment that he applied to most things. He was not incapacitated — he was never truly incapacitated, which was one of the characteristics that made him what he was — but the edges of his deliberation were warmer than they were sober.
Gecko Moria was occupying the same space with the practiced resilience of a man who had learned that the only way to survive in Kaido's company was to be useful enough that the math of having him around worked out favorably. He was drinking too, which was how he was managing his feelings about the Sky Screen's classification of his combat potential.
Captain-level.
The word sat in him like a stone. He had been a Shichibukai. He had had a crew. He had had an island and a castle and an entire economy of fear organized around his name. He had the Kage Kage no Mi (Shadow-Shadow Fruit) and he had, at various points in his life, been considered genuinely dangerous by people whose opinions on the subject were credentialed.
Crocodile was Vice-Emperor level in the Sky Screen's assessment.
"There is no comparison between me and Kin'emon," he announced to no one with the conviction of a man whose argument was primarily with himself. "If we met, I would demonstrate exactly how far above a captain-level I actually am. The Sky Screen doesn't know everything."
The two men beside him did not comment on this.
Kaido, for his part, was watching the Beasts Pirates' future cadre parade with the unfocused attentiveness of someone whose interest was genuine but whose sobriety was not. The new faces. The new abilities. The organization he was building, visible in its matured form six years forward from this particular barrel of wine.
"The Three Disasters are not enough," he said, with the thoughtful quality of a man reaching a conclusion during a period when conclusions were finding him relatively easily. "The Beasts Pirates should have more. If the future is going to look like what the Sky Screen is showing, then we need more disasters than three."
He looked at the green-skinned figure that had appeared briefly in one of the broadcast segments. Then at the woman whose laughter carried a specific quality of not-quite-right.
"More disasters," he repeated, as if tasting the phrase for structural soundness. "Four. Five. Why not."
Gecko Moria, whose relationship with the concept of additional powerful people in Kaido's organization was complicated for reasons that were obvious to anyone who had spent five minutes assessing his situation, made a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement.
The barrel was still more than half full.
The evening was young.
And somewhere in the waters between their current position and every direction, the world was moving into position for what was coming — the operation, the confrontation, the moment that the Sky Screen had been building toward since the first time it had lit up the sky and started telling the world a story about the future it was going to have whether it wanted to or not.
Kaido raised his cup to no one in particular.
The Sea had always belonged to the strong.
That had not changed. That was not going to change.
Everything else was details.
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