-Broadcast-
The Big Mom Pirates had sent three.
Tien Shinhan represented their muscle — a bald man from the Three-Eyed Clan whose wide third eye missed nothing, his body the product of years of Ki refinement taken to a level that most Devil Fruit users found deeply inconvenient to encounter. Charlotte Katakuri represented their authority, the eldest brother who functioned as a surrogate father to those in his care, the closest thing the Big Mom Pirates had to a functioning command structure while their captain drifted between personalities on Cake Island. And nestled in Katakuri's arms, watching everything with steady dark eyes, was a five-year-old girl with long black hair.
Charlotte Hikaru. The youngest of the three, and possibly the most dangerous person in the room.
Chrollo Lucilfer had learned about Tien Shinhan the hard way. A man who had pressed his body past every limit that Devil Fruits were designed to circumvent, whose Ki mastery rendered most borrowed abilities functionally useless, was a category of threat that the Thief-Thief Fruit was poorly equipped to resolve. They had met on Totto Land, and the encounter had ended with Van Augur opening a door and pulling Chrollo through it before the situation became unrecoverable.
Hikaru kept her voice low, speaking up to her brother rather than to the room. "I don't quite understand why adults fight this way. Couldn't we just stay in Totto Land and live well with our brothers and sisters? All this violence — is it really necessary?"
There was no performance in the question. She was genuinely asking.
Charlotte Katakuri looked down at her for a moment before answering. "I brought you here to see the world as it is," he said, patient in the way that only someone who has explained difficult truths many times could be. "The coexistence you're imagining — between the Marine and pirates — it was never real. It was never going to be real. I want you to see that with your own eyes."
As the eldest brother who had shouldered the weight of protecting over eighty siblings, Katakuri had no interest in letting Hikaru carry a fantasy into her first real exposure to the world's logic. The Marine had grown more violent in recent years, not less. The policy that had once allowed pirates who surrendered to at least retain their lives had quietly shifted. The Marine's execution grounds operated at a consistent pace now. Walking into radical Marine territory with your hands up was no longer a survival strategy — it was a question of whether you encountered someone who valued the arrest or someone who valued the head.
"I understand," Hikaru said. "I'll cooperate fully." She glanced sideways. "Tien Shinhan, please stay close to me."
She said it simply, without embarrassment. The limitation was real: the Eight Thousand Spears required proximity. Too great a distance between her and the person carrying the transferred power and the energy transmission degraded, which was not a flaw you wanted discovered mid-battle.
Tien Shinhan gave a single slight nod. He was a man of martial arts philosophy who had not especially wanted to be here, wearing a uniform marked with the character "天" (Heaven) that seemed to announce something about his nature to anyone who could read it. His limbs were dense with muscle that conveyed not bulk but efficiency — every visible line the product of deliberate refinement. His eyes, all three of them, were sharp in the way of someone who had stopped seeing illusions some time ago. He would have preferred to be elsewhere. But the Big Mom Pirates were running short on people who could operate at this level, and watching Charlotte Katakuri and Charlotte Hikaru walk into a combined operation without adequate support was not something he could reconcile with himself.
He stood near the girl and watched the room.
The Beasts Pirates had sent two new faces.
New to the outside world — their names had appeared on wanted posters recently enough that the ink might still be considered fresh. Two billion Berries each, which placed them clearly in the category of problems that required Admiral-level responses. The two Disasters sat beneath the Beast Pirates' flag with the comfortable stillness of creatures that had nothing to prove.
Neferpitou — white cat ears tracking every conversation in the room simultaneously without appearing to, tail moving in a slow continuous rhythm that was less expression than calculation — leaned slightly toward the Ant King beside her.
"The auras here are quite interesting, my lord. If I could taste a few of them, this operation would have additional value."
Meruem did not respond to this with any visible enthusiasm. He was not a creature of appetite in the conventional sense. The world around him was a collection of inputs to be assessed for their relevance to whatever he was currently focused on, and what he was currently focused on was whether this gathering represented an efficient use of his capabilities or a waste of them. He had said as much to Kaido before coming. He was saying it again, internally, to himself.
"I simply hope my opponent isn't inadequate. A weak opponent doesn't just waste time — it serves no purpose at all."
The fifth person under the Beasts Pirates' flag had not joined either of these conversations.
She was perched on the shoulders of something the size of a small building.
Dark WarGreymon stood beneath the Beasts Pirates' banner, a hundred meters of steel-scaled dragon-form that occupied space in the way that geological features did — not dramatically, but in the sense that everything around it reorganized itself accordingly. Black metal plating. Two shield-like structures folded behind its back. Scales that caught light like fragments of cold alloy. Its eyes were active, scanning, genuinely interested in what was ahead of it in a way that Meruem's eyes were not.
Kurozumi Tama sat in the hollow of its shoulder, the position apparently reserved for her specifically. Kaido's Beast Pirates had a particular quality when it came to how they treated the girls who had earned their place within the crew — something between protectiveness and doting that manifested in small concrete ways, like an unspoken agreement about whose shoulder was whose.
"Kuro," Jade said, using the nickname she had long since made standard, "do you think we'll find something worth your time?"
The answer came in a low register that carried enough vibration to be felt before it was heard. "We can only hope so."
The name Kuro was a somewhat improbable thing to attach to a hundred-meter steel dragon-beast with fangs that could shear through warships. This had apparently not discouraged Jade from using it consistently for years. Dark WarGreymon had, at some point, simply accepted this.
Around them, beneath four different Emperor-faction flags, the cadres waited for evening to come.