—Real World—
Outside the Sky Screen, people were still processing what they'd watched.
Rengoku Kyojuro — student of Zephyr, Marine captain, man who had faced a Fourth Apostle with nothing but a sword and the word justice — had died in a demon's grip and come back as the foundation of something the world would eventually call the Demon Pig Admiral. The great demon's legacy, inherited by a Marine's sense of justice. The outcome nobody had predicted, which was, in retrospect, the only kind of outcome that Fate tended to produce.
Fate plays tricks, was the general consensus among those watching. Who could have imagined.
In the real Arabasta — the present one, the living one, not the ruined future version the Sky Screen had been showing — the market district of Alubarna was doing its ordinary business. The stalls were open. The sun was the desert's particular variety of relentless. The residents who had been watching the Sky Screen had, over time, developed the comfortable relationship with it that people develop with ongoing stories: aware that the content was real and distant in the same breath, engaged and not quite afraid.
Then the woman walked into the market and stopped at a stall to ask about prices, and the stall owner looked at her face, and the comfortable distance collapsed entirely.
The golden hair. The dark eyes. The greatsword across her back. The smile, when it came, that the Sky Screen had shown to the whole kingdom during the worst night Arabasta had ever experienced.
"You — you're Lady Deneve." The stall owner's voice had the specific quality of someone watching their own disbelief in real time. "You're actually — that's you, isn't it?"
Deneve appeared to have been hoping to buy something at a market stall and have a quiet morning. She regarded the stall owner with the expression of someone recalibrating expectations.
The man had fully transformed into something between avid fan and devoted pilgrim by the time he finished recognizing her. He refused payment for anything she had touched. He refused payment for anything she had looked at. What he wanted in return — his one request, delivered with the earnestness of someone who has been waiting for this specific moment without knowing it — was an autograph for his daughter. Something to keep. Something the family could hold and point to when they said she was here, she saved us.
Deneve accepted the terms. She signed her name and added the daughter's name beside it, with a note about growing up well, and left the stall with purchases she had not paid for and a slightly complicated expression.
By the time she reached the street, the crowd had assembled.
They had come quietly, the way crowds come when word travels faster than walking — people appearing from adjacent streets and doorways, filling the space around her at a respectful distance that kept contracting as curiosity outweighed caution. They looked at her the way the Sky Screen had been showing her to them: the woman who had stood between their country and a Fourth Apostle in a future that, until recently, they had watched the way you watch a story set somewhere distant.
"Thank you," someone said, from the middle of the crowd, not caring that the future hadn't happened yet.
"We need you to stay," someone else said. "The country needs someone like you."
"Those things — those demons — they're real, aren't they? They're actually real."
Yes, Deneve's presence was saying to everyone assembled. Yes. All of it.
The Arabasta residents who had told themselves, on some practical level, that the Sky Screen's disasters were far away and abstract — that the kingdom burning and the apostle in the streets was a future someone would handle before it arrived — found themselves looking at the woman who had handled it, and the comfortable distance was gone. She was here. She was real. Which meant the things she had fought were real. Which meant the future the Sky Screen was showing was not a story.
The crowd processed this with the specific discomfort of people who have been given information they cannot return.
Deneve, for her part, seemed to be considering how to navigate a public gathering of this size without either abandoning the crowd to its fear or encouraging it to adopt her as a fixed solution to a problem she couldn't be physically present for all the time. She was looking at the people around her with the practiced assessment of someone who has learned to read groups quickly.
Then her expression changed.
Not dramatically. A slight shift in the eyes, a quality of attention that turned inward and then outward in a different direction.
"Everyone." Her voice carried without effort. "Please step back a little. Some uninvited guests have joined your group."
She was smiling. The Madonna smile, the one that had been on her face when she arrived in a burning street and asked a terrified princess if she needed help. It was the most unsettling smile imaginable in this context, because everyone who had watched the Sky Screen knew exactly what it meant.
The crowd stepped back. Fast. Words like demon and apostle were in everyone's minds simultaneously, and bodies moved before the thoughts fully formed.
Two men in Marine uniforms did not step back.
One of them was looking at his colleague.
Deneve's sword came out of its sheath in the motion that the Sky Screen had shown Arabasta's residents before: complete, total, no unnecessary component. The stroke that followed was likewise.
The man's head left his body before anyone present had time to register that the decision had been made. Blood reached the stones of the market. The crowd absorbed this in the silence that follows things that happen faster than the mind can prepare for them, and then a woman at the edge of the gathering screamed, and the silence broke into noise.
"She just —"
"He was wearing a Marine uniform —"
"What is she—"
The surviving Marine had pressed himself against the nearest wall and was not moving, which was the correct instinct. Deneve stood in the pool of blood with her sword still out, her expression carrying no particular regret.
"Check the Marine base," she said, to the surviving man and to anyone else who needed the information. "He was using Beherit power. Based on the demonic energy — three or four sacrifices, at least. Check your recent missing persons reports."
The crowd was looking at the headless body. Watching it.
It was changing.
The limbs were extending and reshaping, the hair thickening across the skin, claws replacing hands where hands had been, a tail extending from where the base of the spine met the coat of the Marine uniform. The human disguise, maintained by whatever demonic will had been sustaining it, was done. What it had been underneath was visible now.
"A demon," someone said, with the specific tone of a person who has just had a theory confirmed at a cost they hadn't expected to pay. "He was actually a demon. He was inside the Marine base—"
The surviving Marine, apparently finding that survival required action, began moving people back from the scene in the professional manner of someone who needs their hands to do something before the rest of them catches up. He would need to report. He would need to figure out how to explain this. He would need to get the body back to Marine headquarters and make it an accounting rather than a scandal.
Whether it would remain a scandal depended on factors above his pay grade.
The news moved through Alubarna the way news moves through markets: fast, shapeshifting, reaching every quarter before the day was half done. The Nefertari royal household received it through official channels. Baroque Works — which still had infrastructure in this country, despite its master's absence — received it through less official ones.
A half-human, half-demon female warrior with a two-hundred-year history, carrying an organization's worth of knowledge about the things the Sea Screen had been showing them, had appeared in the desert kingdom. She had walked into a market, signed an autograph for a child, and beheaded a demon wearing Marine colors without breaking her stride.
Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing for Arabasta depended, as most things did, on which side of the question you were standing on.
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