-Broadcast-
The negotiations had proceeded without significant friction after the fight.
This was, when King thought about it, exactly how it was supposed to work. He had come to the Infinity Castle as the second-in-command of the Beasts Pirates, representing a Yonko-level organization with specific interests and the capacity to make those interests relevant. Kokushibo had demonstrated what the Joker Pirates' upper structure looked like at one tenth effort. Both sides now had the information they had come to exchange, without the inefficiency of either party spending the rest of the meeting trying to determine what the other was actually capable of.
King had recognized Buggy's position as a genuine fourth emperor during the exchange. This was not flattery. It was an accurate assessment of an organization that had risen faster than any equivalent force in living memory and had done so through means that the existing analytical frameworks had not been built to anticipate.
"The Twelve Demon Moons," Kaido said, turning the intelligence over in the way he turned things over when he was finding them interesting enough to examine from multiple angles. "A strange naming system. But if it's organized by combat power rather than seniority, then this Kokushibo is the first person below Buggy himself."
He was not sitting with the full weight of the captain's authority behind him at this moment — he was sitting in the pavilion with his second-in-command and Black Maria, in the mode that had developed over the past few years in which Kaido processed intelligence like a man who had stopped having anything to prove and started having things to understand.
"And the Lower Moon One," he continued. "The woman who loves fire. The one who left an impression." He looked at the middle distance for a moment. "Since Boa Hancock joined the Joker Pirates quietly and stopped appearing at sea, the title of the world's most beautiful woman has started to move to other candidates. This Princess Ann is being positioned for it."
King said nothing about Princess Ann. The relevant impression she had made on the Beasts Pirates' personnel who encountered her during the Infinity Castle visit was documented in his report. The detail about pirates with unspecified impure intentions spontaneously combusting was in the report. He left the rest of the analysis to the people whose analysis it was.
"Beautiful women with dangerous abilities," Kaido said, with the specific tone of a man who had been the King of Beasts long enough to have a settled view on this category of thing. "The more beautiful, the more dangerous. It's almost a rule."
Black Maria refilled his cup without comment.
"The invitation to move against Mary Geoise," King said, returning the conversation to the part with strategic weight. "The Joker Pirates are proposing a four-way alliance. Temporary. All four Yonko groups, coordinated, directed at the holy land."
Kaido had thought it was a joke when the proposal first arrived.
Not because the target was wrong. Not because the ambition was unfounded. But because the accumulated weight of eight hundred years of Celestial Dragon authority — the deep-rooted certainty that had settled into the bones of the world's population, the reflexive deference that made even the largest pirate organizations treat Marijoa as a backdrop to their ambitions rather than an obstacle to be removed — was not something you simply decided to overcome one morning.
The Revolutionary Army had been building toward the slogan of thorough revolution for decades. The pirates who might benefit from the World Nobles' removal had spent those same decades developing their territories and accumulating strength, all with the shared unspoken understanding that you did not move against the Celestial Dragons until the corrupt old order was visibly collapsing on its own.
Everyone was waiting for the first person to shoot.
The Joker Pirates had apparently decided to be that person, and had sent King to negotiate about whether the Beasts Pirates wanted to be the second.
"Buggy remained calm," Kaido said, "watching the duel between two kings." He said it with the particular weight of a man referencing something that carried personal significance, and looked at King.
King met his gaze steadily. The duel between two kings — himself and Blackbeard — was the mechanism by which the Phoenix Fruit had changed ownership. None of that had been coincidence. Black Maria's intelligence work had mapped Blackbeard's next route of action months in advance, and Kaido had made a decision about what to do with that information.
You could ask Blackbeard Marshall D. Teach to give you a better Devil Fruit. Kaido would ask without hesitation. The Pteranodon fruit in King's body was a relic of an earlier calculation; the Phoenix Fruit was worth considerably more than whatever interests needed to be exchanged for it. Blackbeard had been moving through the sea collecting Devil Fruits from their users through methods that everyone understood but few said plainly. There were topics to discuss between kings. Plenty of them.
King looked at Black Maria for a moment. She caught it and returned it with the small acknowledgment of someone who understood exactly what she was being acknowledged for and was not going to make more of it than the situation required.
Without her mapping of Blackbeard's movements, the duel would not have happened. The Phoenix Fruit would still be somewhere else.
"His character is worthy of praise," Kaido said. "Buggy. For a clown, he has remarkable composure."
On the Sky Screen, the perspective shifted. The Infinity Castle vanished, replaced by open ocean — a ship moving fast, moving hard, the crew on its deck communicating the specific flavor of urgency that was distinct from battle urgency. This was the urgency of flight: the urgency of a crew that had done the arithmetic on their situation and arrived at a number they did not like.
"They're still behind us," someone called toward the bow. "We cannot shake them."
"Captain — please."
"We do not want to die out here —"
The figure at the bow had the stillness of a man who had stopped listening to the panic behind him because the panic could not change the calculation, and the calculation required concentration to conduct correctly. Long golden hair moved in the sea wind. The six vertical lines on his forehead had a quality that the fear in his crew's voices did not carry — not calm exactly, but settled. The armor on his left arm caught the light. The black cross tattoo at his throat disappeared into the collar of his shirt and reappeared above it.
Character Notes materialized across the Sky Screen's display:
Captain of the Hawkins Pirates — Basil Hawkins. Wara Wara no Mi (Straw-Straw Fruit). Paramecia type.
The cards were already spread across the surface in front of him, the reading complete. He had run it twice and arrived at the same result.
"There is one path with a survival probability above zero," Hawkins said, in the tone of a man conveying facts rather than opinions. "Everything else is zero. Zero is not a number we can work with."
The crew waited.
"We go to Elegia."
Elegia.
The name landed on the crew with the specific weight of a word that meant something before it was spoken and something worse after.
It had been a music kingdom, once — famous on the Grand Line for the precise quality of what it produced and the specific culture that had grown up around that production, beloved by musicians and their audiences across the entire route. The kind of place that people felt a particular sadness about when it was gone, because what it had been was not something that could be replicated simply by rebuilding the physical structures.
Red-Haired Shanks had destroyed it. The circumstances of why remained publicly unresolved — no explanation that fully accounted for the scale of what had happened there, the decision of a man with the power of a Yonko directed at a small music kingdom for reasons that the surviving accounts agreed on in their facts and disagreed on in their meaning.
After that, Elegia became the place where the Red Hair Pirates ended.
The Marine had used Uta as the instrument. Shanks' daughter — the great singer, the musical prodigy who had been stationed on Elegia since whatever had happened there years before — was the leverage that turned a Yonko's power against a Yonko's intelligence. The trap had been obvious to anyone analyzing it from the outside, but there were doors that Shanks would walk through knowing they were traps because the alternative was not walking through them, and Uta was one of those doors.
The war at Elegia had been long. The Marine Admirals who had been positioned there had fought a Yonko in serious distress — not Shanks at his most confident and strategic, but Shanks wounded by the leverage that had brought him there and the knowledge of what was waiting inside. By the end of it, the Red Hair Pirates were gone. Shanks himself was missing, which was the word the available intelligence used because it was technically more accurate than the alternatives, even if the alternatives were what most people who had tracked the situation believed.
Elegia was now a forbidden area. The war had changed the island in ways that went beyond physical damage, and the things that had been present on it since the war were not the kind of things that pirate ships or Marine vessels had reason to approach.
Basil Hawkins had run the divination twice. The result was ten percent survival if they went to Elegia. The result was zero percent survival if they went anywhere else.
Ten percent was a number you could work with.
"Set course," he said.
The crew, to their credit, did not continue arguing. They had followed him this far because his divination had been right about every previous situation that had seemed unsurvivable, and they understood the logic of trusting an ability that had a consistent track record over the instinct that was currently suggesting that Elegia was worse than the Blackbeard Pirates behind them.
The Blackbeard Pirates were a certainty.
Ten percent was not a certainty, but ten percent was not nothing.
The ship came around and found its new heading.
Behind them, the pursuit continued. Ahead of them, the place where one of the world's great powers had ended was waiting to see what use it could be to the handful of terrified pirates currently steering toward it with the specific desperation of people who had run out of all the options that made sense and arrived at the one that simply remained.
The sea accepted the heading and offered nothing in the way of reassurance.
It rarely did.
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