-Broadcast-
The Azure Dragon descended to a lower altitude and Kaido stepped off it.
The horns rose from his head against the grey sky of Elegia. He had dressed simply for this — white clothes, as though the island's particular reputation had not factored into the wardrobe decision, which was accurate. Kaido's wardrobe decisions were not typically influenced by reputation. He set his feet on the ground of the cursed island and stood there for a moment, doing what he always did when he entered unfamiliar territory: letting his Conqueror's Haki spread outward to take the measure of what was present.
Nothing came back.
The fog absorbed it the way it had absorbed everything else — Observation Haki, ambient awareness, the basic sensory extension that King had deployed on approach and which had returned the same result: Elegia's coverage was total, and whatever was generating the fog was doing so at a depth that defeated the detection methods of people who were among the strongest alive.
King landed beside him, the Pteranodon form collapsing back into his human shape. The two of them stood at approximately the same height, which was one of the practical realities of their working relationship — communication between people whose altitude differential made the exchange awkward was communication that was already spending resources on logistics before it reached content.
"Blackbeard chose this location," King said. "Whether that was calculated or coincidental has implications either way."
Kaido looked at the ruins spreading upward from the shoreline. The fog moved through them with the quality of something that had been doing this for a while and had settled into it. The building fragments that remained suggested a culture that had organized its architecture around acoustics — curved walls, open plazas with specific geometric relationships to each other, the bones of a city that had been built to carry sound rather than simply contain people.
"The newspapers gave it half a page," Kaido said. "Uta, Shanks' daughter. Red Hair Pirates killed in Elegia. A few sentences." He moved toward the island's interior. "Morgans writes less when there is more to hide. Whatever happened here, even the birdman decided not to push it."
King fell into step beside him.
"Whatever it is," Kaido said, "we'll understand it better from inside than from the beach."
They walked into the fog.
The lights and shadows found them almost immediately.
Not with the quality of an attack — not the sharp clarity of something coming at you with intent — but with the diffuse, ambient arrival of things that were simply present in the atmosphere of Elegia, the way certain weather conditions were present. They flickered in the periphery first, then more centrally as the fog deepened around the two Beasts Pirates. Each one was a complete thing: a person, a moment, a life fragment rendered in light with enough fidelity that the brain processed it as real before the reasoning part had time to correct.
A child running. A couple arguing. A musician playing alone in a room. An old man dying in a bed with family around him. A soldier realizing something terrible at the same moment it was too late.
No repetition. An infinite supply of them, each one different, each one carrying the specific weight of something that had actually happened to someone.
King watched them without moving toward them. He had the professional discipline of someone who had encountered enough unusual things to know that unusual things that wanted you to engage with them on their own terms were usually not offering something you would benefit from accepting.
Kaido watched them with the evaluating attention of a man who found them interesting as a phenomenon without being particularly tempted by the content.
"Fruit ability," Kaido said. "Or the remnant of one."
They found Basil Hawkins in the square, which had once been the concert venue at Elegia's center.
He was already in the Wara Wara no Mi (Straw-Straw Fruit)'s full external manifestation — a scarecrow form several meters tall, the straw-constructed giant standing motionless in the fog with an expression on the simplified face that communicated something beyond panic, the specific quality of a man who had run his cards and found that the calculation he had been relying on had stopped applying.
"The light and shadows eat people," the scarecrow said, at a volume that suggested he was narrating to himself rather than reporting to an audience. "They pull whoever looks at them in. The crew — they looked too long, and now they're —"
He stopped.
The fog shifted slightly. Movement, at the edge of Kaido and King's visible range.
A girl stood in the mist. She was perhaps seventeen, perhaps slightly younger. The right half of her hair was red. The left half was white. She wore the same stage clothes that had been visible in the concert tour imagery the Sky Screen had broadcast — the performance costume of the world's most famous entertainer, now worn on a ruined island in the middle of the night with no audience except a scarecrow and two of the world's most dangerous pirates.
She was smiling.
The eyes above the smile were the specific black of things that had stopped having a relationship with the concept of being alive.
"Brother Scarecrow," she said. Her voice had the quality of music already — not performing, not projecting, just carrying the precise tonal structure that a trained voice carried all the time, the musicianship present in every syllable. "Are you happy?"
Basil Hawkins, to his credit, recognized her immediately and raised his alert to its maximum. The Wara Wara no Mi's defenses — the straw copies that absorbed lethal damage in place of the original, the fundamental resilience of a fruit that distributed harm rather than accepting it — were already active.
Uta raised one hand.
The musical notes appeared beside her like punctuation — small, luminous, a simple motif that was not complicated and was not trying to be. Just a few notes, offered openly into the fog.
When the notes reached him, Hawkins realized it was already too late.
He opened his eyes.
The North Sea. His childhood room. The video player was running — one of the Germa Kingdom's Sentai programs, the production that the Vinsmoke family had been distributing through the North Blue's entertainment networks for decades, the colorful fantasy of armored heroes that had inspired a generation of North Sea children to think about adventure as something available to them. He had watched it in this room so many times that he knew every episode.
He was small. His hands were a child's hands.
The divination cards were gone. The island of Elegia was gone. The fog, the Blackbeard Pirates, the Beasts Pirates, the survival calculation — all of it was gone, and what was present instead was the particular completeness of a memory that had been reconstructed with perfect fidelity: the smell of the room, the quality of the light, the sounds from the other parts of the house that he had grown up not consciously registering but had been present for every moment of his early life.
Basil Hawkins, supernova of the Worst Generation, captain of the Hawkins Pirates, one of the last surviving members of the era that had shaken the New World — sat in his childhood room and watched the Germa heroes fight their colorful battles on screen, and forgot, piece by piece, that he had ever been anything else.
The Blackbeard Pirates had entered from the other side of the island.
Marshall D. Teach walked through Elegia with the specific comfort of a man who was not bothered by its atmosphere, which Shiryu had been noting since they landed. The island made Shiryu irritable — something in the air, in the fog, in the aggregate quality of the place pressed against his composure with an insistence that was difficult to manage without acknowledging it. He was managing it.
Teach seemed not to notice. He walked through the ruins the way he walked everywhere, which was the walk of a man who had decided the world owed him comfortable passage through it and had not yet been meaningfully corrected on this point.
The music found Shiryu first.
He heard it in the sword — the Raiu, his blade, Storm Bringer, the weapon that had served him through Impel Down and beyond, which had a sensitivity to certain frequencies that he had always understood as the blade's own personality and which was now ringing very quietly in his grip. Then it found his ears through the fog, a simple melody, not aggressive, just present.
The ruins of Elegia disappeared.
Underwater. The corridors of Impel Down's deepest level, which Shiryu knew better than any space he had ever occupied — the specific architecture of a place built for containing things that civilization had decided needed to stay contained, Level 6, where the lights ran dimmer than the other levels and the sounds from the other floors became theoretical rather than audible.
He was walking the round. The cells on either side held people he recognized.
Doflamingo, Crocodile, others from the sea's catalogue of significant prisoners — figures who had reason to be there, by various accounting systems, and who were present now and making the sounds that the cells of Impel Down's deepest level tended to produce.
And the others. Sakazuki, in the cell at the far end — Admiral Akainu, the man made of magma, reduced to the architecture of containment. Vice Admiral Gion two cells down, which Shiryu found interesting. And further along the row, in the largest cell, the accommodations that someone had apparently felt were necessary for —
Saint Saturn. One of the Five Elders. The ancient thing that wore a man's face. In a cell.
The Raiu moved in his hand, and the sounds from the cells were music to a man who had spent his professional life on the other side of the bars.
Rain Shiryu walked his round, and the light around him was the artificial light of the deepest levels, and every prisoner was exactly where he had always felt, privately, that they ought to be.
Teach heard his name.
He turned in the fog and the fog was not fog anymore.
The Moby Dick. The flagship of the Whitebeard Pirates, the ship he had spent years on in the particular role of a man who was patient enough to wait out whatever duration the waiting required. The Whitebeard Pirates' flag snapped in the sea wind above. The crew moved around him on the deck with the comfortable familiarity of people who had been together long enough that their movements were calibrated to each other's presence.
And there was Ace.
Fire Fist Portgas D. Ace, with the freckles and the ASCE tattoo on his left arm and the hat and the specific combination of confidence and irritation that he directed at Teach whenever they occupied the same space — which was the expression Teach had been looking at for years before the decision, the expression he had memorized the way you memorized the face of someone you were going to do something significant about.
"Your taste is really something," Ace said, in the voice that had no reason to be here because Ace was dead. He had been dead since Marineford, had been killed specifically by the magma fist of the man now occupying the cell in Shiryu's illusion, had been buried somewhere that the world had agreed was where he belonged and from which he had not returned. "You actually ate that."
And there was Thatch. Fourth division commander, the man who had found the fruit, who had been the specific instrument through which the plan had become executable — calling from the galley with the comfortable voice of someone who was doing the thing they were built for, asking if the food met the standard.
And the old man, sitting in his seat at the stern, IV drip running, nurses in pink leopard print attending, the sheer physical scale of Edward Newgate present on the ship the way weather was present. The same way he had been present every day for years, reliable as geography.
Teach stood on the deck of the Moby Dick and looked at everyone who had no reason to be alive.
"Interesting," he said, quietly. The murderous intent was still present in him — it was always present, it was too fundamental a part of him to be absent even in an illusion that had reconstructed everything else about this context with perfect fidelity. The brothers around him felt it and looked at him with the specific discomfort of people who were experiencing something about a person they thought they knew that did not match what they thought they knew.
"Everything here makes me miss it," Teach said.
He looked at Ace across the deck, and the black aura of the Yami Yami no Mi (Dark-Dark Fruit) settled around him like clothing, and the Moby Dick held both of them in the same space as it always had, and the flag snapped in the wind above them.
The island of Elegia offered no commentary.
It had been providing this service for some time now, and had learned that commentary was not what the guests were coming for.