-Broadcast-
The waters around Elegia were colder than the surrounding sea.
This was the first thing the Hawkins Pirates noticed as they crossed into the restricted approach — not cold in the way that northern latitudes were cold, which was a gradual thing that the body could prepare for, but cold in the particular way of somewhere that had been wrong for a long time and had made the wrongness into a permanent atmospheric condition. The crew members in lighter clothing felt it immediately. Even those who were dressed for the Grand Line's unpredictability felt it as something that the clothes were not entirely addressing.
Basil Hawkins looked at his cards.
"Five percent," he said.
This landed on the crew with the specific quality of bad news that was also better than expected. Coming in, the calculation had been ten percent. Now it was five. The number was moving in the wrong direction.
"The cards continue to fall," he said, more quietly. "But five percent is not zero." He set the current spread aside and began again with the focused patience of a man whose entire methodology was built on the idea that the future could be read if you were willing to look at it honestly, including the parts that were not encouraging. "Zero is the only number we cannot work with."
No one on the crew offered an argument. The argument had already been settled by the ship behind them, which was still visible at the edge of the horizon — the Blackbeard Pirates' vessel with its three-skull flag, still closing, with a persistence that had stopped being about tactical positioning and had become about the specific refusal of one very large man to allow a particular Devil Fruit to escape his inventory one more time.
This was Eustass Kid's fault. Everyone on this ship knew it was Eustass Kid's fault. The Punk Hazard incident, or whatever the specific sequence of events had been that led to Kid deciding to test his Jiki Jiki no Mi (Magnet-Magnet Fruit) against Blackbeard Marshall D. Teach directly rather than doing anything sensible — the Jiki Jiki no Mi was now in Blackbeard's possession, and Basil Hawkins was now the last Worst Generation captain in this part of the ocean who still had a fruit worth taking, and the four-emperor-level organization pursuing him was demonstrating with considerable commitment that they intended to collect it.
The only option that the cards were not calling zero was the island ahead.
"Abandon ship on approach," Hawkins said. "Go ashore and scatter. Take your best chances individually. Whoever survives, survives."
The ship made its run for Elegia at maximum speed.
The island at night was the ruins of something that had loved music.
Walking through what remained of the streets, the Hawkins Pirates felt this in the particular way that places held the memory of what they had been — not as active haunting but as a quality of the architecture, the way the angles of broken walls still referenced the intent of the original construction, the carved decorations visible in the surviving stonework still carrying the aesthetic of a culture that had organized itself around sound and celebration. A music kingdom. Built specifically to produce and share and live inside music, for generations.
Gone.
The crew scattered into the ruins. The ones who were not loyal stayed near the water, which was probably the right decision by conventional analysis and which the Hawkins Pirates' captain already knew was not where the cards were pointing him. Hawkins moved deeper into the island with the handful of crew members who had decided that proximity to him was worth something, even here.
The fog arrived without announcement.
"Observation Haki isn't reading it," one of the cadres said. There was a specific quality in the voice — not the ordinary concern of a skilled fighter who had encountered something unusual, but the disorientation of someone whose primary tool had stopped working and who was processing what that meant about the nature of the thing causing it. "The field is compressing. I'm getting less range with every second."
Hawkins noted this and continued scanning with every sense he had available, including the ones that did not come from training.
Ahead of them, in the fog, lights and shadows moved.
Not the movement of people — not the readable body-language of enemies in concealment. Something more complex. Fragments of scenes playing out in the fog like the fog itself had become the medium for someone's memory: a figure crying, a figure laughing, joy and grief cycling through the same haunted air with the quality of something that was always present here and simply became visible under certain conditions.
The Hawkins Pirates watched, the way people watched things that were beautiful and terrible simultaneously, the way people watched things that were clearly connected to something much larger than themselves and that they did not entirely understand.
Hawkins glanced sideways.
Counted.
"There were ten of us," he said, quietly.
Eight faces looked back at him.
He had not seen them go. They had been at his shoulder and then they had not been, and the fog had given nothing — no sound, no struggle, no Observation Haki registration of departure. They were simply gone, the way things in places like this were gone when the place itself decided it needed them for something.
One by one, across the next minutes, the count continued to fall.
The fog accepted the Hawkins Pirates into it with the patient efficiency of something that had been doing this for a while.
On the beach where the Blackbeard Pirates had docked, Marshall D. Teach stepped onto the sand of Elegia and let the atmosphere of the place land on him the way a man let rain land — present, registered, not something that required adjustment.
He was a large man. He had always been a large man, and the years of eating and drinking at the scale appropriate to someone of his particular philosophy had not reduced this. The beer belly preceded him. The devilish laughter that announced him to every sea he crossed was momentarily absent, replaced by the focused attention of a man who had entered a place he recognized.
"Someone like me is here," he said, to the general air of Elegia rather than to any specific crew member. "The old kind. Releasing what's in them into the environment." He looked at the fog moving through the ruins above the beach. "That madman again, probably."
Behind him, Shiryu adjusted the cigar at the corner of his mouth and studied the ruins with the specific alertness of someone who had been managing correctional facilities long enough to have a professional relationship with dangerous environments.
Character Notes materialized across the Sky Screen:
First Ship Captain of the Blackbeard Pirates. Former Chief Warden of Impel Down.
He had replaced the Great Prison's official insignia on his warden's uniform with a skull. The uniform otherwise remained, the way a man kept the structural form of a previous life while replacing its content with something that suited him better. His chin had a broad, deliberate prominence. His smile was present even when nothing in the immediate environment was amusing, which was not the smile of a cheerful man but the smile of a man who had decided that this was the expression he presented to situations rather than the expression situations produced in him.
"They sanitized the Elegia reports in the newspapers," he said. "Morgans published what the New Marines allowed. The real accounting of what happened here was never distributed." He exhaled smoke. The fog absorbed it. "I have been inside enough terrible places to know when a place has been terrible in ways that didn't make the official record."
He was becoming more irritable with each minute on the island. He had noticed this and was managing it with the controlled attention of a professional. The island had an effect. Shiryu was not someone who was typically affected by atmospheres.
Blackbeard, walking ahead of him through the beach ruins, seemed entirely unbothered.
This was, Shiryu noted, consistent.
The sound arrived before the vision.
A dragon roar. Not the sound of a large animal — the sound of something operating at the scale of weather, a sonic event that was felt in the chest before the ears had finished processing it, that carried the specific resonance of a Zoan transformation being deployed at full expression by a creature that had not made peace with the concept of subtlety.
The sea around Elegia illuminated briefly.
The Azure Dragon was enormous. Even for Kaido, even given what the world had seen of the King of Beasts' full form, the Uo Uo no Mi, Model: Seiryū (Fish-Fish Fruit, Azure Dragon) at full release was an argument about scale that most living things were not equipped to counter. The green scales caught the moonlight across a body that required a significant portion of the sky above the island to accommodate, the white halos wreathing its length giving it the quality of something that the older traditions of these waters would have recognized as divine before they had access to the vocabulary of Devil Fruits.
Beside the Azure Dragon, a small dark shape kept pace with its wings working hard.
The Ryu Ryu no Mi, Model: Pteranodon (Dragon-Dragon Fruit, Ancient Species) user was maintaining altitude through effort rather than the casual kinetics available to the thing next to him, which was the honest representation of the gap between what King was currently carrying and what he would eventually carry. He was holding station. He was not lagging. But the margin was visible.
Three forces had arrived at Elegia simultaneously.
The Hawkins Pirates, who had come because the only alternative was zero.
The Blackbeard Pirates, who had come because a fruit they wanted was on the island and they intended to collect it.
The Beasts Pirates — Kaido and King — who had come because two of the world's four most powerful pirates converging on the same location was the kind of event that had multiple topics attached to it worth discussing in person.
The island absorbed all of them into its ruins and its fog and the particular quality of what Elegia had been carrying since the war that had ended it, and waited to see what three forces finding each other in a place like this would produce.
It had been a music kingdom once.
It was something else now.
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