Gan Fall looked at the golden-haired man with the nagging certainty that he had seen him before — somewhere, in some context that the current situation made difficult to reach. It took him a moment, and then it came to him.
The Sky Screen.
The man sitting in the main seat without a hint of patience was Shiki the Golden Lion. One of the great pirates of the old era — the same era as Gold Roger and Garp, men who had shaped the world that followed them. The rudder that had once been bolted through his skull was gone, the wound healed. He looked like what he was: a man who had survived things that should have killed him and was not finished yet.
Gan Fall, with his head floating approximately where a head was supposed to be, revised his assessment of the morning's events.
"Where is Enel?" Shiki asked. He said it the way people who rarely have to repeat themselves ask questions. "Where is the gold? And the historical text — I want that too."
He received a face full of spit in return.
It lasted approximately two seconds before Shiki's open hand connected with Gan Fall's right cheek with a force that rattled his teeth and his thinking simultaneously. Neither apology nor ceremony attended the blow. Pirates of Shiki's generation had never bothered with the pretense that power came with social obligations.
The slap did something useful, though. It cleared Gan Fall's head.
He was old, not stupid. He had survived Enel's seizure of Sky Island through a combination of stubbornness and the fact that Enel found it more convenient to drive him out than to kill him outright. And now, floating in pieces in Law's Room while the Golden Lion waited for his answers, he ran the calculation of his situation with the speed of a man who did not have time for slow thinking.
A tiger to drive out the wolf.
Enel was the problem. Enel had power that the people of Sky Island could not challenge themselves, and would never challenge themselves, because the gap was too large and the consequences of failure too final. But Enel had a ceiling — the Sky Screen had shown it clearly. His lightning was devastating against anyone who could not coat themselves in Armament Haki, and there was no one on Sky Island who could. Against someone who could?
He had been knocked off his own island by a rubber-bodied boy.
"Enel is at the highest point of Sky Island," Gan Fall said. "The gold is kept near him. The stone tablet as well."
He watched Shiki's expression register the information without visible surprise. Gold was gold. The historical text, he had seen once, years ago, when a subordinate of the Pirate King had carved something into its face, and the sight had stayed with him for reasons he couldn't fully articulate. Moving it away from Sky Island seemed like losing something. But losing something was better than what remained if neither it nor the gold gave Shiki a reason to leave his people alive.
He talked. He explained who he was, and who he had been, and what Enel had done to the people under his supposed protection. He described the conditions honestly: the enforced labor, the power structure, the four priests. He made no appeal to sentiment because sentiment was not a currency that worked with men like this. He made himself useful.
Law, listening, said: "Captain. The island's position — high ground, hard to approach, natural cover. We need a base that can't be easily taken. This could work. Use the old man as a figurehead and he keeps the population cooperative."
Shiki turned the idea over. Sky Island had everything the argument implied: elevation that made surface approach nearly impossible, existing infrastructure, a working population, resources. The Fuwa Fuwa no Mi (Float-Float Fruit) let him lift any non-living mass he touched, which meant he didn't need natural geography to hold a floating fortress — but a natural one was better. No maintenance required.
He looked at Gan Fall.
"Stop playing god for someone who doesn't deserve your loyalty. Join the Flying Pirates. Manage Sky Island for me. You keep your people alive and I keep my operation running. Everyone gets what they can't get otherwise."
Gan Fall had no other choices. He knew it. The old man who had ridden a winged horse toward a ship the size of a small island with a lance he was not going to get to use had done so because there were no other options then either. He had always known that was what it was.
"I Agreed," he said.
Law reassembled him. The Room dissolved. Gan Fall stood on his own feet again, bruised and intact, and guided the Flying Pirates' ship through the sea of clouds toward the island's highest point.
Enel felt them coming before he saw them.
The Mantra — his Observation Haki extended across the island's mind-network — picked up the ship and the presences on it with plenty of time to respond. He chose not to run. The thought of running did not visit him for long enough to constitute a decision. He was the God of the Skies. He had beaten the priest cadre, beaten the Shandians, beaten everyone Skypiea had put in front of him. The fact that the Sky Screen showed him being defeated by Luffy was an ongoing irritant in his theology but it remained a single data point, and the man arriving now was not Luffy.
When the Flying Pirates reached the top of Sky Island, the four priests were already in position. The sky above crackled with Enel's ambient charge. He stood at the center of it, electricity crawling across his arms and shoulders, expression composed.
"You old relic." He looked at Shiki the way he looked at most things — from a significant conceptual elevation. "Sky Island doesn't want you here. Take your ship and go."
"A little god with no Haki lecturing me," Shiki said pleasantly, standing at the ship's rail. He did not appear to find the lightning impressive. "I've seen your future, boy. You end up doing something worthwhile with yourself eventually. Right now you're just in my way."
The pillar of lightning came without further ceremony.
It was enormous — a column of Enel's full output routed through one arm and released upward, a technique that would have leveled anything inside its radius that could conduct electricity and a great many things that couldn't. It hit the Flying Pirates' fleet directly and completely, every ship in the formation swallowed by the discharge simultaneously.
The priests stared.
Enel watched, satisfied, for exactly as long as it took him to realize nothing had caught fire.
The ships were intact. Undamaged. The lightning that should have torn through their hulls had been gathered instead — redirected, shaped, turned by something that had no business being able to touch lightning at all.
"Devil Fruit against Devil Fruit," Shiki said, from the ship's rail, with the tone of a teacher who has waited a long time for a lesson to become relevant. He raised one hand.
"Raijin — Inazuma no Tategami." (Lion's Might — Lightning Scroll)
The Fuwa Fuwa no Mi did not generate lightning. What it did was move it. The entire charge Enel had produced was redirected and compressed by Shiki's gravity-inverting force into a new shape — lion heads, enormous, made of Enel's own lightning and carrying the focused intent of someone who had spent decades understanding how to weaponize whatever was at hand. One after another they descended, guided by Shiki's outstretched hand.
The four priests fled without deliberation. Whatever honor they had brought to their positions was not sufficient to cover this.
Enel stood his ground and made the correct calculation for his body type: a Logia user who had achieved full elemental transformation could not be electrocuted by his own lightning. The lion heads passed through him and hit the terrain around him, gouging craters in the stone, throwing debris in every direction. His body scattered and reformed on the other side of the impact zone, untouched.
"Mortal," he said, with renewed composure.
The word was still leaving his mouth when the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi reached him.
It was not dramatic in its appearance. No visible beam, no flash, no impact. Just a force — invisible, implacable — that decided Enel's body no longer had a relationship with the ground. The Float-Float Fruit did not require physical contact to lift non-living matter; Shiki's range, and his precision, had been refined over decades. Gravity for Enel simply inverted, and he rose.
He struggled. The force was indifferent to struggling. It held him with the patience of a technique that had never encountered anything it needed to hurry for.
The sky above Skypiea had always been his. He had ruled it, named himself God of it, expected to leave it voluntarily on a spaceship of his own construction at a time of his choosing.
Today it simply had him.
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