—Real World—
News of Deneve's appearance in Arabasta spread the way news spreads in a country with living markets and no shortage of people with time to talk: fast, with embellishments that grew with each retelling, and arriving in most households before dinner. The demon killed in the market square — in Marine uniform, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses — became the story of the week. Beherit's reach was no longer abstract. It had come into the streets.
Baroque Works had its own channels, and the peripheral members still active in Arabasta had already sent word by the time the stall owner was showing his daughter the autograph.
Crocodile's conference room contained a table, a map, and an atmosphere that had been getting progressively less comfortable since the Sky Screen broadcast had started making his plans obsolete in real time.
The map of Arabasta on the display board was covered in markings — rebel-held areas, sympathetic commanders, access routes, the slow accumulation of years spent converting a kingdom's vulnerabilities into leverage. It was a good map. It was an increasingly useless map.
"Calculate the timing," Crocodile said. He was looking at the board with the expression of someone who has already run the numbers and would like someone else to arrive at the same conclusion independently. "Deneve appears exactly when the Sky Screen showed her appearing. She wasn't early. She wasn't late. That means she's following a sequence we can see."
He turned from the board.
"If Naraku comes next — on that sea train, through Arabasta — then everything the Sky Screen showed us about the station, the station being destroyed, the three-kilometer radius, all of it — that happens here. To this country. To our infrastructure."
The silence in the room was the silence of people doing calculation they don't enjoy.
"Even with Deneve killing him in the end," he continued, "the collateral damage is—" He stopped. A ruined country. A population that doesn't exist anymore. Years of investment in rebel networks and political leverage, and the population the leverage was built on no longer alive to be leveraged. "What exactly are we working with afterward?"
Mr. 1 took this as his cue. "Boss. Naraku isn't a primitive. He watches the same Sky Screen we do. If he sees Deneve appear in advance of him, and understands what that means for his timeline, he has every reason to route differently." He spread his hands. "The future isn't fixed just because the Sky Screen showed it. Naraku avoiding Deneve is the rational play. He'll make it."
This was reasonable. Crocodile acknowledged it was reasonable without it making him feel better.
The interest in the Black Order was general. Every cadre in the room had spent the previous day thinking about what an organization with two-hundred-year-old members and the operational capability to produce Claymore-level combatants could offer to the right alliance. Mr. 1 had been most direct about it: find the headquarters, establish contact, explore whether the arrangement was mutual.
"Their mandate is demons and apostles," Zala said, from her corner of the table. "As long as the king is human, they consider the rest of it secular affairs. Deneve won't intervene in what we're planning."
Which meant the Claymore was not the variable to worry about. Good.
"Robin and the Straw Hats are in Alubarna." Zala continued from her position at the end of the table. "With Vivi. We missed our window for anything against the royal household."
Crocodile's expression didn't change, which was its own form of response.
Kizaru had protected the Straw Hats at Drum Island — deliberately, visibly, in a way that was not ambiguous about its intent. Ace's sworn brother was aboard that crew. Baroque Works, without Pluton in hand, was not in a position to declare war on the Whitebeard Pirates, which was what acting against Luffy would amount to. Crocodile was aware of all of this and had been aware of it before anyone said it.
The Blackbeard situation was its own frustration — the Anti-Traitor team Marco led had come close, had gotten the location through Baroque Works' channels, and had still arrived after Blackbeard's people had dissolved into the rebel crowds. Thousands of people. A few disguised targets. The math was not in favor of quick resolution.
"Pluton," Crocodile said, returning to the thing that had made none of the rest of this feel worth managing. "Underground in Wano. In Kaido's territory. With Kaido now confirmed as Nika." He looked at the map as if it had personally offended him. "I spent years working toward that stone, and the answer it gave me is: the thing you want is inside the territory of someone you cannot fight."
He could not beat Whitebeard. He had learned that. He could certainly not beat Kaido — not the Kaido who had apparently been transforming for five years and arrived at something the Sky Screen called Nika. Not ten of him tied together.
The Baroque Works consensus, arrived at without much debate, was: establish contact with the Black Order if possible, continue monitoring the Sky Screen for useful developments, do not move against anything that has Whitebeard's protection, and consider whether there were other secrets in Arabasta worth finding beyond the one that had already been broadcast to the world.
Wait. Watch. Build.
It was not the plan Crocodile had wanted to be executing at this stage of his career. It was the plan that was still available to him.
The speedboat that approached Onigashima's shore was not a warship and was not trying to look like one. Kaido stood at its bow with the specific posture of someone returning to a place that belongs to them after a long absence, and the island that received him was already in the process of rearranging its collective atmosphere to match the fact of his return.
Doflamingo had disembarked halfway, heading back toward Dressrosa with everything portable he owned. He was a smart man. He understood without being told that a man who had stabbed the World Government in the back needed to be somewhere defensible when the World Government finished processing the insult, and Dressrosa alone was not that place. He had chosen proximity to Onigashima. He had chosen the pirate ship he was now fully aboard.
Queen was on the dock when Kaido arrived, grinning with the particular intensity of someone who has been managing everything in the captain's absence and is very relieved to hand it back.
"Welcome home, Captain. Everyone has been waiting."
The welcome was genuine. The debrief was immediate. Queen moved from news to news with the efficiency of a man who has been keeping lists — and the first item on the list, delivered with the careful expression of someone who knows the answer is bad, was Flame Disaster King.
King was alive. Recovering. The slash from Dracule Mihawk had gone deep enough that the body was still treating the damage, and the Lunarian constitution — which Queen had spent considerable time studying and still didn't fully understand — was doing the work slowly rather than quickly. Currently unconscious. Queen had the medical bay ready.
"Take him there now," Kaido said. "I want daily reports."
Then: "Yamato."
The dock went quiet in the particular way of people who know their next words are going to be received poorly.
Queen's crew had confirmed through Stussy, whose sources on Sabaody Archipelago were reliable, that Yamato had been spotted in the archipelago recently. Not captured. Moving. The Marine had deployed to find her, and she was currently somewhere between their searches and her own destination, and she had not yet fallen into anyone's hands.
Kaido absorbed this.
Black Maria stepped forward with the information she had gathered — complete, unembellished — and finished with the assessment that everyone in the room was already moving toward: the World Government now had two confirmed reasons to consider Yamato valuable as leverage. Kaido's connection to Nika. Pluton's location in Wano's underground. Two things that made a Marineford scenario involving the Beasts Pirates' only heir not only possible but plausible.
"She's the only heir," Black Maria said. Not as an accusation. As a fact that the situation had made relevant.
Kaido's face was the face of someone who had educated his child with a stick for years and was now discovering that other people thought they could apply the same method. The specific anger of a parent who hits his own child and means something entirely different by it than outsiders hitting that child would mean.
He did not elaborate on what he felt. He moved on, because there was something more immediately pressing that had been sitting in him since before they docked.
"Kurozumi Orochi," he said. "What has he been doing?"
The name had the quality of something lodged incorrectly — not comfortable, working its way toward resolution. Years of Orochi's management of Wano, years of Uchiha Madara's presence behind that management, years of an arrangement that had benefited Kaido and had also involved more accommodation than his temperament was built for. He wanted an accounting. He wanted to test what was actually there, behind the shogun's careful performance of normality.
The report was: Orochi had sent search parties to sea looking for Kozuki Momonosuke, which was expected. Beyond that, he had spent his time in exactly the way he usually spent his time — surrounded by women, attending to pleasures, projecting the image of a shogun whose administration had reached a comfortable plateau.
Whether there was something behind that image was the question Kaido had come home intending to answer.
He looked at Onigashima's interior, at the island that was his and the operation that was his and the subordinates waiting for his next word, and felt the particular weight of a man who has returned from a significant absence to discover that the world has continued moving without consulting him.
There was a great deal to do.