—Real World—
The God of the Pioneer's story was always going to be a side note for most of the world.
Three hundred years of history compressed into a tour guide's monologue, and the honest truth was that the audience it mattered to most were the ones who had already been dead for two centuries. Over a timeline long enough, everyone becomes a footnote. The living are primarily interested in living.
What did grip the powerful was the Blue Panacea.
The moment the Sky Screen had confirmed its existence — a compound capable of keeping cells perpetually active, pushing cell division beyond all natural limits, granting something that functioned as biological immortality — every major force in the world had begun quiet, urgent calculations. The weak point of anyone who held power was always the same: they died. Everything they controlled eventually transferred to someone else's hands. The one thing no army, no Devil Fruit, no title could solve was a human body wearing out.
Chopper was suddenly the most interesting person in the world to a great many people for reasons that had nothing to do with whether they liked him.
And the Outer God connection — the speculation that the Blue Panacea's creation had something to do with knowledge received during Chopper's coma — was a wildfire that caught on every surface it touched. Once the theory existed, it could not be put back.
At the highest point of Sky Island, something was happening to Enel.
From a distance, the most obvious symptom was the lightning — random arcs discharging skyward at irregular intervals, without apparent trigger or target, simply the overflow of a man generating too much electricity to contain. Accompanying each flash was laughter: unstructured, periodic, the laughter of someone who has received information they cannot fully process and have temporarily stopped trying.
Gedatsu, one of the four priests, stood at a cautious distance and monitored the sky with the expression of a man hoping very much that he would not be struck.
"He's lost it," he said, to no one in particular. "This might be the real thing this time."
He was not wrong to be nervous. Enel in a stable mood was unpredictable. Enel in the grip of genuine revelation was something the priests had not dealt with before, and the lightning was not becoming less frequent.
What had happened was simple and, from Enel's perspective, precisely what should have happened all along.
He had watched himself on the Sky Screen. Not the defeat at the hands of Luffy — he had accepted that the rubber-bodied pirate was his nemesis and filed it accordingly — but what came after. The Moon. The campfire. The Discovery breaking through the atmosphere with no one aboard except himself and the electrical field his sleeping body generated. The return ten years later. The Pioneer and its two-hundred-year voyage. The monuments.
The title.
God of the Pioneer.
He had always known he was a god. The universe had simply taken some time to confirm it properly.
The priests were less enthusiastic about the implications.
"He's going to want to build another ship," Shadley said, leaning against a pillar with the resigned posture of someone running the numbers on a plan they already disliked. "Something bigger than the Ark Maxim. And he's going to want us to help build it."
"I'm not going to space," Gedatsu said immediately.
"I don't think he's going to ask us."
"I'm still not going."
The Ark Maxim had cost a tremendous amount of manpower and resources, and its fate had been to crash on an uninhabited island after a decade of use. The Sky Screen's version of events showed something far more ambitious in its future — a ship called the Discovery, built under Caesar Clown's supervision with Marine funding. The Ark Maxim, in comparison, was a prototype that had served its purpose and been surpassed.
Enel knew this now. The Moon was accessible. Anyone sufficiently motivated could get there. He needed something that could reach somewhere worth reaching.
The problem, though he did not know it yet, was about to arrive.
Gan Fall had been patrolling the sea of clouds on the back of Pierre — the strange bird with the Uma Uma no Mi (Horse-Horse Fruit) that gave him the only reliable mobility he had left — when the shape appeared below the cloudline.
He had done this for years. Since Enel had driven him from the throne he had held as Sky Island's protector, Gan Fall had refused to simply leave. He was too old for that kind of clean withdrawal. He transformed himself into a Sky Knight and patrolled, and watched, and tried to find ways to matter to his people within the constraints of a situation that had removed most of his options.
Today's patrol became something different when he saw the ship.
It rose through the clouds slowly, which was the first strange thing — no Knock-Up Stream, no catapult, just a gradual and enormous emergence, as though the sea of clouds were an ocean surface and the ship had been beneath it all along. It was massive. The kind of massive that changed a person's sense of scale when they saw it for the first time — metal-sheathed, angular, a moving fortress with a hull that caught the light and threw it back cold.
A pirate flag flew at its mast.
The residents of Sky Island who caught sight of it first began calling out warnings. Some of them recognized the flag from somewhere they couldn't immediately place — a half-memory that didn't resolve into certainty fast enough to be useful. Within minutes, people were moving away from the cloudline, clearing the open spaces, putting walls between themselves and whatever this was.
Gan Fall tightened his grip on his lance and made the only decision consistent with who he was.
He flew toward it.
It was not a calculated tactical choice. He was fifty years old, riding a winged horse-bird with one good lance and the stubbornness of a man who had been protecting these people before Enel arrived, and he intended to die doing something useful if that was what was available to him.
On the grandstand of the ship, Shiki the Golden Lion sat at ease in the main seat with a cigar sending a thin line of smoke toward the sky above him. The Rudder that had once been bolted through his head — removed at some point by the Ope Ope no Mi's surgical precision — were no longer there. The deep wounds they had left behind had been healed. He was operating at perhaps seventy percent of what he had been at his peak; sufficient, for present purposes.
Sky Screen Character Note: Hundred Beast — Golden Lion Shiki
"There's an old man on a bird flying up toward us," he observed, in the mild tone of someone noting weather. He raised his voice slightly. "Law. Deal with it."
Trafalgar Law, the Surgeon of Death, looked over the rail at Gan Fall's approach and diagnosed the situation in approximately the time it took him to raise one hand.
"Room."
The sphere of the Ope Ope no Mi (Op-Op Fruit) expanded outward from his palm, a surgical space that reorganized everything within it according to its own rules. Gan Fall had enough time to register the dome's edge before he was inside it.
Law cut the air four times. Clean, unhurried lines. The cuts found everything inside the Room that needed separating.
Gan Fall's body came apart at every major joint — arms, legs, torso, head — floating in the Room's space with clinical precision, separated but alive, because the Ope Ope no Mi did not require death to render a person helpless. His armor fell away in pieces around him. His lance dropped. He was conscious and intact in every compartment and completely incapable of moving any of them.
Law carried Gan Fall's head to where Shiki was sitting and set it down.
Shiki looked at it. The head blinked. Its mouth moved.
"Who are you." Gan Fall's voice was steadier than the situation warranted. "What do you want with Sky Island?"
Shiki's expression carried the particular interest of someone who has arrived with questions and found a local ready to answer them. Law's ability continued to impress. The former god of Sky Island, separated into neat components, alive and alert — it was a remarkably efficient way to conduct an interview.
He leaned forward and let the cigar smoke drift between them.
"I have a few things I'd like to know," he said.