—Broadcast—
The Admiral Naraku arc had reached its conclusion, and the Sky Screen moved on the way it always moved — without ceremony, without regard for whether those watching had finished processing what they'd seen.
Kagura was having dinner with Fleet Admiral Artoria Pendragon.
The relationship between Naraku's clone and the Marine's commanding officer had been developing since before the Arabasta broadcast, and dinner was the current expression of it: a shared meal across a table, the formal distance of superior and subordinate comfortably established and gradually made comfortable. Kagura ate with the contained precision of someone who has been raised to take up an appropriate amount of space. Artoria ate with the straightforward appetite of someone who works hard and treats food as fuel without being unpleasant about it.
"The Beherit situation," Artoria said, "doesn't need to be handled by the Marine alone. We've been contacted by an organization that wants to send representatives to Marine Headquarters. They want to discuss coordinating on the apostle problem."
Kagura looked up from her bowl.
"The Black Order," she said. Not a question — she shared memories with Admiral Naraku, and those memories included enough of what Deneve had told Vivi to sketch the organization's shape. "They bypassed the World Government."
"Completely." Artoria's expression did not indicate surprise. "Which tells us something about their trust in the Celestial Dragons, and also something about their judgment."
The red Beherit was on the table between them, which was not where anyone wanted it to be. The stone had the quality of demanding attention regardless of where it was placed — that eye somewhere on its surface, the skin-like texture that registered wrongly against the hardness of the table beneath it. Artoria had been keeping it close because not keeping it close meant it was somewhere else, and somewhere else meant someone else's hands, and that calculation had not resolved in favor of anywhere better.
Kagura picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and swallowed it.
The motion was as straightforward as swallowing anything else. One hand, one motion, done.
Artoria watched this happen with the expression of someone who has seen a great deal of unconventional problem-solving and has learned to evaluate it on results rather than aesthetics.
"Better inside me than next to an Admiral," Kagura said, with the calm of someone who has assessed an option and selected it. "I can contain it. The alternative was a worse option."
"Agreed." Artoria moved on. "What do you know about what the Black Order will ask us for?"
"Intelligence support, mostly. They can identify apostles and kill them. What they can't do is be everywhere at once, and Beherit is appearing in incidents faster than their people can respond." Kagura set her chopsticks down. "They need the Marine's information network to triage — know where the highest-level disasters are, get there before the smaller incidents compound into something worse."
"That's a useful exchange." Artoria was already calculating. The Marine had everything the Black Order lacked in terms of reach and early warning. The Black Order had capabilities against apostles that the Marine clearly needed. The World Government's absence from the arrangement was not a complication — it was a feature.
"Will Naraku be back before the annual military meeting?" Artoria asked. The twelve Admirals' gathering was not the kind of event that accommodated absences.
"He will." Kagura delivered this with the certainty of someone who shares a direct connection to the answer. "He knows how important it is."
Artoria nodded with the specific satisfaction of a commander who has asked a question and received an answer she can act on. The twelve Admirals gathering at Marine Headquarters would require a great deal of preparation beyond attendance — she had arranged something for the occasion, something that was currently being made in conditions that would have killed most of the people who had tried to assist with it.
The Sky Screen did not announce the transition. One moment it showed the dinner table. The next, it showed heat.
The forge room was deep underground — by necessity rather than preference, since what happened there required containment. The air was the air of a place where temperature has replaced atmosphere as the primary environmental characteristic, dense with it, moving with it, the kind of heat that operates on the body the way weather operates on a landscape: comprehensively and without appeal. The furnace at the room's center was not a furnace in any conventional sense; it operated at scales that required the word to be used loosely. Magma moved through it with the slow authority of geological processes compressed into a room.
The craftsmen who had been selected for this work were already at their limit and had withdrawn to whatever positions allowed them to keep breathing without using Armament Haki as a buffer against the temperature. The two figures who remained did not require that consideration.
One of them was a hundred meters tall.
He dominated the space the way something that size dominates any space — not through intention but through the simple physics of scale. His skin was the dark red of cooling rock, and his head was a goat's head, and he carried his hammer with the specific posture of someone who has been holding tools so long that their hand and the tool have reached an accommodation. His expression was the expression of a craftsman at work: complete concentration directed at the object in front of him, everything else categorized as irrelevant until the work was done.
Every strike of the hammer produced a sound that the room's walls received with the resigned quality of surfaces that have been enduring this for some time.
"Sakazuki." The voice came from somewhere inside the enormous frame, deep and carrying in the way that voices carry when the chest they're generated from is substantially larger than a human chest. "More fire. The furnace is running low."
Admiral Sakazuki, standing at a size that the hundred-meter forge-master made look modest, turned toward the furnace with the expression of a man who has been providing this service regularly enough that it no longer requires particular emotional investment.
"Big Fire."
—Character Notes: Marine Admiral — Demigod Ornn—
His right arm went red from shoulder to fingertip as the Magu Magu no Mi responded to intention, and the lava that poured from it moved with the concentrated force of something that has been waiting for an appropriate outlet. It entered the furnace in a column that the furnace received greedily — the temperature inside rising to meet the new fuel, the forge-light intensifying, the haze above the opening thickening with heat that distorted the air above it into shapes.
The craftsmen who were still visible at the room's edges took the opportunity to withdraw another few steps.
"Enough." Ornn's professional assessment was delivered without looking up from the weapon blank he was working. "Stop the supply. Any more and the furnace loses the refinement."
Sakazuki stopped. He had learned, over the course of this collaboration, that Ornn's instructions about temperature and timing were not the estimates of someone approximating — they were the precise judgments of something that had been forging metal since before most of the organizations in the world existed. Disagreeing with them would be both wrong and pointless.
The furnace held its heat. Inside it, the twelfth weapon was in the process of becoming itself — still embryonic, still the potential of what it would be rather than the thing itself, but already radiating the specific quality of something that has been made by someone who knows what they're making. The energy fluctuations that came off it were perceptible to anyone with Observation Haki in the room, which was both of them.
Sakazuki looked at it.
He knew what it would be when it was finished. He knew because Ornn had made eleven others like it, each one going to one of the twelve Admirals, each one made from the specific combination of materials and technique that only a Demigod with centuries of practice and an Admiral's Magu Magu no Mi as a heat source could produce. Sakazuki's own weapon had been the second one completed.
He had used it since, and he had developed opinions about it, and those opinions were positive.
"Two more days," Ornn said, without looking up.
Sakazuki accepted this and settled into the role of standby stoker — available when called, not otherwise in the way. There were worse ways to spend two days than standing in a forge room watching something extraordinary being made.
The furnace pulsed with the slow rhythm of deep heat doing patient work.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~