-Real World-
The revelation had detonated across the sea the way the best revelations always did — not with a single explosion but with a cascade, each layer of implication landing after the previous one had almost finished settling, the full weight of it only becoming apparent once everyone had had a moment to process the first three layers and realized there were seven more underneath.
Uta. Miss Uta. The most popular female entertainer on the sea since the death of her predecessor at the top of that particular cultural hierarchy. Sold-out concert tours from one end of the Grand Line to the other. Fans from every walk of life, from every kingdom and island and pirate crew that could access a newspaper or a Den Den Mushi broadcast. A voice that did what voices rarely did — not just performed well but made the audience feel, specifically and reliably, that the immediate world contained less pain than it had contained five minutes before she started singing.
That woman was the daughter of Red-Haired Shanks.
Morgans had purchased the printing presses years ago with precisely this kind of moment in mind. The newspapers moved. The newspapers kept moving. The circulation figures being reported back to him from the distribution networks had a quality that made even Morgans — who had a professional relationship with extraordinary numbers — take a moment.
In the Marine war room, Borsalino held a cup of tea with the mild expression of a man processing something that was connecting several previously separate bodies of information into a coherent picture.
"I've attended her concerts," he said, in the tone of someone making a minor personal disclosure in a professional context. "In disguise, naturally. The hair is partly red, which I noticed. But she has white on the other side as well, and the red is shorter, so the connection to Shanks was not —" he considered the appropriate phrasing "— immediately obvious."
He had attended several, in fact. He found it relaxing. He was careful about the disguises.
"This is not the relevant issue," Sengoku said.
"No," Borsalino agreed pleasantly. "The relevant issue is whether using a man's daughter as leverage to bring him into an encirclement reflects well on the institution. The answer to that question is also not relevant to the current operational picture, which is that the elite Marine strength has already sailed for the Devil's Triangle, and adding a fourth Yonko to the variables in that engagement is not something we have the bandwidth to manage."
He set down the cup.
"Kaido is enough to focus on," he said. "Red-Haired Shanks can wait."
Sengoku looked at the map. The Shichibukai — six of the seven, the cooperative ones, the ones who had accepted their terms and arrived at the designated position — were already at the Devil's Triangle. He and Borsalino were the last Marine contingent to depart. The operation was already in motion.
Shanks could wait.
He had managed to have no psychological burden about the Uta situation until Borsalino phrased it in a way that required him to confirm the absence of that burden out loud, which was a different experience. He set this aside and focused on the map.
On the ship carrying the assembled Shichibukai toward the Devil's Triangle, Doflamingo was at the rail.
He was looking at the black water ahead with the expression of a man who had arrived at an assessment of the current situation and found it, on balance, interesting. Dangerous, yes. Potentially fatal to several parties including himself. But interesting.
Six of the Shichibukai on a single vessel. One of the Five Elders in the cabin, which was the World Government's way of communicating that this operation was not the kind in which suboptimal effort would be overlooked or forgiven. The target was Kaido, the King of Beasts. The instructions were clear. The consequences of those instructions not producing the desired result were also clear.
"The duel between two kings," he said, to the air rather than to any specific audience. The Sky Screen had shown the Infinity Castle encounter — King and Blackbeard, the exchange of the Phoenix Fruit, the combat that had preceded the exchange. Doflamingo had watched it with the particular attention of someone cataloguing information about people who were going to be relevant to his future. "Blackbeard Teach and the beast's second-in-command. That was genuinely entertaining."
He turned slightly, looking back at the deck.
"Uta," he said, with the quality of a man following a thought to its conclusion. "The great singer. Red-Haired Shanks' protection, gone. Whatever she wanted from this world, wanting it without a Yonko's backing changes the math entirely."
He was not being cruel about it. He was being accurate, which often produced the same sound.
"Beautiful women who carry dangerous power and lose their protectors," he said. "The outcomes for that category are not historically varied." His smile had the quality it always had — present, pleasant, containing something underneath that was not either of those things. "Living in misery or dying quickly. She'll choose one eventually."
He looked back at the water.
The ship was making good time.
The Empress was watching the Sky Screen.
The broadcast about Elegia and Uta had been running alongside the other threads of the future that the screen had been unspooling for months — the information arriving in the particular order that Kaito's construction of the narrative required, each revelation positioned to land with maximum disruption on the populations watching it. Hancock had processed enough of it to have developed a relationship with the content that was different from how she had processed it at the beginning.
At the beginning she had watched with the controlled attention of a sovereign assessing threats. Now she watched with the specific quality of someone who had looked into a version of the future and found it consistently worse than anticipated, for herself and for everyone she could observe.
Uta had lost Shanks. Shanks was "missing" — the polite word for the category of outcome that the Elegia battle had produced for the Red Hair Pirates. A singer with a god-level voice and a fruit that could reshape reality through music, standing on a ruined island with an adoptive father who could not stop her, without the protection that had kept her untouchable.
The most beautiful women in the world. Herself. Uta. The pattern that Doflamingo had articulated from the deck of the Shichibukai ship was not wrong. The beautiful women with dangerous power who lost their protection — the world had consistent views on what happened to them.
The Medusa in her body.
The consciousness of the Mero Mero no Mi that had been sleeping at the substrate of her existence since the moment she had consumed the fruit on Amazon Lily — she could feel it the way you felt something that was present in a room without being visible. Waiting. The patient kind of waiting that had no particular deadline, that could afford to wait because it understood that the conditions it was waiting for would eventually arrive.
If the worst happened. If the possession that had claimed Boa Hancock's body in the broadcast future came to pass in the current reality — would she die? The Sky Screen had not answered this.
She looked at the broadcast image of Uta on Elegia, the girl's two-tone hair catching whatever light remained on the ruined island, and thought about what it meant to carry something in your body that was not entirely yours.
She was not the only one asking that question.
Somewhere in the New World, Red-Haired Shanks had stopped being still.
He had been watching the Sky Screen with the same measured attention he gave everything — the specific quality of a man who had spent decades operating at the level where information was the most valuable thing available and who had learned to process it without reacting to it immediately. This quality had served him well. It had carried him from Gol D. Roger's crew to the position of one of the world's four most powerful pirates, through events that had required considerable composure to survive.
The Sky Screen announcing his relationship with Uta to the world was the kind of event that composure could only do so much about.
"The disguise wasn't working in any case," said one of the Red Hair Pirates' senior crew, with the specific voice of someone trying to find a positive angle.
Shanks was not interested in angles. He was interested in the fact that every pirate crew and every hostile force that had reasons to want leverage over him now knew that Uta existed, where Uta was, and what Uta meant to him. The fiction that he had maintained for years — the deliberate distance, the absence from her public life, the sustained refusal to let anyone connect the world-famous singer to the Four Emperors Red Hair Pirates — had been dissolved in a single broadcast. All of the careful work of keeping her separate from the violence that was his daily profession had evaporated.
He had stayed away to protect her. The Sky Screen had made the protection impossible.
"The fruit," he said. The Uta Uta no Mi (Song-Song Fruit) — the ability that Uta carried, the Paramecia that could do things with music that went well beyond entertainment, that had a history on Elegia that Shanks understood better than almost anyone else alive. He had been worried about it for years. He was more worried about it now.
"We're going to Elegia," he said. "To bring her home."
The crew did not argue. These were men and women who had watched Uta grow up, had known her since before she understood what she was, had felt the specific guilt of years spent at deliberate distance from someone they cared about because the caring required the distance. The enthusiasm with which they reorganized the ship and gathered supplies in the following hour had the quality of something that had been waiting a long time for permission.
In less than an hour, the Red Hair Pirates were underway.
On Elegia, the ruins of what had been a music kingdom received the sunlight with the indifference of things that had completed their relationship with their original purpose and moved on.
Gordon stood where he usually stood when he was watching Uta and not knowing how to stop what she was doing.
He was not a young man. He was not a powerful man. He was a king whose kingdom had ended, an adoptive father whose daughter was planning something for which he had no adequate vocabulary, a bystander to events that were too large for the tools he had available. He had carried part of the responsibility for what had happened here years before — if he had watched more carefully, if Shanks had not chosen to stay away, if the conditions had been different — and carrying that responsibility had not given him the ability to change what had followed from it.
"What you want to create was wrong from the beginning," he said. His voice had the quality of something that had been said many times before and had never produced the desired result. "Uta. The future Elegia — the Sky Screen showing this island becoming a dead place — is that not the proof? Is that not what the sky is telling you?"
Uta was looking at the Sky Screen.
She was always looking at the Sky Screen, now. The broadcast had shown her the Red Hair Pirates' end. Had shown her Shanks' fate — both arms, Still Water Prison, the particular defeat that the future held for the man who had always been the foundation under everything she could not articulate as a child about what safety felt like. She had watched it with the hysterical swings that Gordon had been living with since, the periods of inconsolable grief followed by the periods of absolute conviction about what she was going to do about it.
The half of her hair that was red moved in the island's sea wind. The half that was white moved beside it.
"I want to create a world where there is no pain," she said. "Where there is only happiness. Where there is music." She looked up at the screen above. "Will the sky tell me I'm wrong to want that?"
Gordon had no answer that she would accept. He had tried several.
The Sky Screen offered no response to direct questions. It had never offered responses to direct questions. It showed what it chose to show and left the interpretation to whoever was watching.
Uta kept looking at it, waiting for an answer it would not give, on an island that had already paid the full price of what happened when someone with her kind of power decided to make the world over into the shape they needed it to be.
The ruins waited with her.
They were patient. They had been there before the decision and they would be there after.
Whatever came next, Elegia had already seen how stories like this ended.