-Broadcast-
Under the pilot's control, the Infinity Castle drifted toward the Marine's headquarters at Rome. It moved with the unhurried certainty of something very large that had no need to hurry. The cloud cover swallowed it completely, and the lightning interference it generated kept Observation Haki at bay. To the world below, the sky looked like a storm coming.
The Joker Pirates' own cadres had not yet appeared. The reinforcements from the other three Emperor factions were already assembled, and they were not particularly pleased about it. Being received by Galdino alone felt like a slight, regardless of how capable the man was. The Clown Emperor's absence had a particular quality to it — not urgent absence, but studied absence, the kind that communicated intention rather than oversight.
"At most, we can tie up six Admirals between us. Are the Joker Pirates expecting one man to handle the remaining six? That seems like an extraordinary level of confidence in their own arrangement."
Chrollo Lucilfer was not given to complaining, but he was given to precise assessments, and his precise assessment of the Joker Pirates' cadre configuration was that it had always been strategically opaque. The Marine's intelligence division had failed to issue a comprehensive bounty order on most of its members. The faces that appeared publicly were always the same handful. The former Warlords who had allegedly joined the crew had simply ceased to be visible. What Buggy the Clown actually had in reserve was a question no one outside his inner circle could answer with confidence.
If the situation deteriorated past a certain point, Chrollo had already decided: he would take Coby and leave. There was nothing in this operation worth dying for on the Joker Pirates' behalf.
Then an unkempt young man walked out of the city.
He had not shaved in some time. His hair was long and untended, falling past his ears without any particular arrangement. He wore a plain black windbreaker, and his expression carried the specific quality of someone who had been carrying grief long enough that it had reorganized itself into something resembling calm. He looked like a man who had walked a very long road and had not yet decided whether he had reached anywhere worth stopping.
Eren Yeager.
Every set of eyes in the assembled gathering moved to him.
The Ancient Weapon Terra, here in the Infinity Castle, standing under Buggy's flag. The confirmation of something many had suspected but none had been able to verify. Across the gathered cadres, the memories of Dressrosa were available to all of them, and none of the memories were comfortable.
Doflamingo had understood what Eren was and had used it with the particular ingenuity of a man who viewed the world's worst possibilities as business opportunities. The scheme had been elegant in its horror: a tourist destination built around alcohol spiked with the Founding Titan's cerebrospinal fluid, distributed to visitors and then exported to the wider world through supply chains that moved faster than anyone realized. On the day Eren triggered the Rumbling, everyone who had consumed that alcohol — regardless of where they were standing in the four seas or the Emperor territories — transformed.
The transformations were not gentle. Each one was an explosion. Across the world, in alehouses and dockyards and aboard ships, people had become Colossal Titans in an instant, and the Titans had then done what Titans did.
Charlotte Katakuri had been there when Totto Land's crisis hit. He had fought alongside his brothers and sisters against the mindless giants until Straw Hat Luffy stopped the Founding Titan at its source. The Rumbling was resolved, Doflamingo was killed in the aftermath, and Eren Yeager dove into the sea and disappeared. Cake Island still bore the scars of that day. The recovery effort had been ongoing for years and had not yet finished. Charlotte Katakuri's memory of the Colossal Titans wearing Armament Haki like armor and crushing everything beneath them was perfectly intact, and it was not a memory that generated warm feelings.
"So you've been sheltered by Buggy the Clown all this time. No wonder no one on the sea could find you." Katakuri's voice was level, as it almost always was. "Are you planning to trigger the Rumbling again?"
Neferpitou had a different reaction. The aura coming off Eren was interesting to her — something dense and layered, the way genuinely dangerous things tended to feel from close range. She filed this away.
Beehive Island had taken heavy casualties on the day of the Rumbling. Nearly a third of Blackbeard's subordinates had transformed instantaneously, forcing Teach and his cadres to spend days suppressing the resulting chaos before the island was functional again. When the count was finalized, two-thirds of the Blackbeard Pirates' lower ranks had simply vanished. The organization had taken a blow it would not fully recover from for years.
Wano Country had fared better by virtue of its isolation from the wider world's supply chains. A handful of Colossal Titans had appeared, but the number was manageable. Dark WarGreymon had ended the problem quickly.
"Kuro," Kurozumi Tama said, sitting on Dark WarGreymon's shoulder with the calm of someone replaying a scene they'd seen from a similar angle before, "good thing you moved fast that day. Otherwise I might have ended up under those feet."
The response came from somewhere lower and larger. "It required minimal effort."
On that day, Tama had been caught in the fleeing crowd when one of the Colossal Titans turned its attention her way. She was not fast enough to outrun adult men, and the crowd had been contracting around her. Dark WarGreymon had not waited to be summoned. It had broken through the constraints that governed the boundary between its original world and this one, absorbing the cost of that forced transition, and materialized between Tama and the Titan in a single movement. One technique. Black light swallowing the Colossal Giant and the surrounding street entirely. The threat ended.
That day was, in a sense, the beginning of her path to the Beasts Pirates. The Dango Dango no Mi had given her connections to animals — useful, protective connections, but limited in scale. After what had happened in Wano, it became clear that limitations were not something she could afford to keep. Kaido had extended an invitation. She had accepted it. She no longer went hungry. She had more say over her own fate than she had ever imagined as a child. And Dark WarGreymon's shoulder remained her preferred vantage point when she wanted to observe the world from a position that reminded her how far she had come.
How many companions like Dark WarGreymon Kurozumi Tama could call at once — that was a question the people in this room had no answer to.
Eren Yeager said nothing to Katakuri's question. After a moment he simply spoke to the assembled group: "I'll participate in this operation. I'll assist in disrupting the Marine's deployment inside the city."
No one objected. No one particularly wanted to.
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